“You can’t not believe in therapists,” I said. “They’re not fairies.”
“They might as well be to Grandma Hosseini.” Mom cracked open a fortune cookie and read, “Your shoes will make you happy today.”
We looked down at Mom’s cream-colored high-heeled sandals and my once-white Converse, caked with grime, and laughed. “Profound, Mom,” I said. “Really deep.”
The Unlikelies came over to “watch a movie on my laptop.” Dad and Mom were already settled on the porch drinking decaf and eating peach pie out of the pie pan.
“Why don’t you just watch it on the television?” Dad said. “Why are you all going to crowd around a laptop?”
“It’s not really a movie. It’s a new YouTube thing,” I said, turning up Dad’s Springsteen music ever so slightly, just to make sure they couldn’t eavesdrop, before ushering Alice, Val, and Gordie into the front hallway and letting the door slam behind me.
“That wasn’t suspicious at all,” Gordie said, lying down on my bed after we made our way up to my room.
Alice was distracted with her phone. She looked up and smiled weirdly at Val and me. “Izzy’s parents want you guys to visit Izzy with me,” Alice said.
“Why us?” I said, glancing at Val.
“They think some good, clean, homegrown hero fun will be good for Izzy.” Izzy’s parents truly believed they could nurse her back to health with chicken soup and gossip magazines like she had a nasty case of bronchitis.
Val and I agreed to go, but I could tell by the look on Val’s face that she was as uncomfortable with the idea as I was.
“Nice bobblehead,” Alice said, shaking Shay and me. “Hey, let’s text Shay.”
Alice took a close-up of her silver nose ring with my phone and sent it to Shay, captioned with the classic Girl Scout mantra Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.
Shay didn’t reply.
We waited for Jean, who was late because he was creating and later because he decided to take Dad up on his invite to sit and hang out for a few. By the time he got upstairs with his mysterious bag, the rest of us were over hearing about how Val and Javi were in a great place and he took her to dinner at Red Lobster and they had crazy great sex in Javi’s car.
“Okay, vomit,” Alice said, taking down a photo of Seth from my bulletin board and holding it up. “He’s really hairy, huh?”
Gordie laughed, turned over on his side, and hugged my Flopper.
As Jean fumbled around his duffel bag preparing his big reveal, Alice texted, How does it feel having Gordie Harris lying on your bed?
OMG. Stop, I texted back.
Let me guess… it rhymes with buttery. Or sluttery?
I texted back, Fluttery fluttery fluttery fluttery.
“I’m going to be royally pissed if you don’t like this. I’ve been working my ass off in the studio trying to get it right,” Jean said.
“Show us. Show us,” we all chanted. I jumped up and locked my door.
Jean reached into his duffel bag and brought out our new mascot.
At first, we didn’t know what to think. It was beautiful and bizarre at the same time.
“I took the Civil War dolls from Mr. Upton’s shed and made miniature custom masks,” Jean said as we examined the five smiling masked Union soldiers joined together at the hands.
There was the bearded Ulysses S. Grant Haitian carnival mask with curved horns, the wooden Salvadoran goddess mask in pigtails, the metal Persian warrior mask interwoven with intricate Celtic symbols.
“This is a perfect Sadie mask,” I said, moving in to look more closely.
Gordie’s Scottish mask was made of wood and painted bright blue and white. Jean had fastened a tiny kilt around the soldier’s waist. And Alice got her many-colored smiling dog carved from a coconut shell.
“This is brilliant. Not only did you capture the essence of the Unlikelies, the masks somehow look like us,” Gordie said. He got up and half hugged Jean, who nodded and broke into a huge smile.
“Phew, I was nervous.”
We positioned the line of tiny-masked soldiers in all different kinds of light, making sure there was nothing near them identifying my bedroom. Alice got her camera from the car and shot until we caught the right angle.
And our mascot avatar was born.
Gordie promptly uploaded it and blasted every single site we had ever anti-trolled.
Kinky 3, Cakes, Hermanita, Pierre, and Cecil were gone forever, replaced by smiling, hand-holding masked soldiers standing five in a row.
It was the perfect blend of mysterious, powerful, and weirdly inspiring.
“Everybody get comfortable,” I said. “We have a lot to discuss.”
Things got real when I unearthed the pink barf bucket of yellow diamonds.
Alice, Val, and Jean stared at the polished stones layered at the bottom of the bucket while Gordie arranged the masked soldiers, Flopper, and my bobbleheads on the window seat.
I Googled yellow diamonds. “They do call them canary diamonds,” I said, surprised.
“Why do you think I’ve been calling them that?” Gordie said, laughing.
I studied the screen. “They were so rare in the nineteen twenties there were well-known smuggling networks going from Africa to Canada to major US cities.”
Gordie let out a howl. Jean was staging a bobblehead and masked Civil War doll orgy.
“Is anyone listening to me?”
“I am,” Val said.
“I’m playing with diamonds,” Alice said.
“Shh,” I hissed. “My mother has bionic hearing. Call them canaries. Now we know why the lizard spent his time in Nova Scotia. He was smuggling,” I said, closing the laptop. “Come on, can we focus?”
I had to threaten to kick everybody out before they agreed to help me brainstorm legitimate ways to redeem the lizard’s evil deeds. I passed out green index cards and we sat in a circle on the floor, hunched over with pensive expressions.
Five minutes later, we each dropped a stack of folded cards into the middle of our circle. I gathered them up and drew the first folded card:
Start a homeless shelter for vulnerable youth.
“That’s Val’s handwriting,” Jean said, grabbing the card. I slapped his hand and drew again.
Hotel for old, drunk hookers. I threw Jean’s card at him.
Bed-and-breakfast for old, drunk hookers. I threw Gordie’s card and punched him.
Humane Society. (They need a new facility.) “Nice, Alice, but Mr. Upton already gave a lot to the Humane Society.”
They wrote another batch of cards, but we found a reason to veto each idea.
“In all seriousness, I’d buy land,” Gordie said. “Just stretches of open land that developers could never get their hands on. I’d be like the modern-day Teddy Roosevelt.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Alice said.
“Although we wouldn’t be able to get much. Maybe in Siberia,” Gordie said. “But that’ll be prime real estate when global warming ramps up.”
Frustrated and exhausted, I got up and ripped the green index cards into bits. We stuffed the diamonds back into the cheesecloth bags and into Andy’s legs and groin, prompting more annoying jokes from Jean and Gordie.