“So these kids just get to pick who they are?” Frank searched for an apt metaphor and finally settled on, “It’s like a video game.”
“No, it’s like a fairy tale,” said Penn. Rosie rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe you look like a filthy scullery maid, but inside, you’re really a princess, and if you’re good, you find the right grave to cry on or the right lamp to rub, and you become a princess on the outside too. You look like a frog, but kiss the right lips and you magically transform into the prince you’ve known yourself to be inside all along. If you’re good and worthy, you always get an outside to match your inside. Virtue leads straight to transformation; transformation leads instantly to happily ever after.”
“It’s a long way off,” Rosie added. “A long, long, long way off.”
“And no one,” Penn continued, as if Rosie hadn’t spoken at all, “is more good and worthy and virtuous than Poppy.”
*
Next door, Poppy was torturing the dogs. Orion, dressed as a yachtsman zombie himself, had also brought over his costume stash for the occasion, and Poppy and Aggie were trying to make the dogs do a play. Poppy had Jupiter in a vest Rigel had knit years earlier for ’80s day at school (so he could look like someone named Duckie from a movie called Pretty in Pink, though the vest looked neither pink nor ducklike to her) and Roverella girdled in six knit sweatbands, striping her middle like a zebra. She and Aggie were writing a play about neither ducks nor dogs nor zebras but rather Venus and Serena Williams teamed up to battle little green ball-shaped aliens. The dogs were doing great with the tennis balls but otherwise phoning it in.
Ben was making popcorn for the third time in three hours. They went through a lot of popcorn in the kid house. Rigel and Orion were choosing a movie for everyone to watch, a process of weight-and-measure evaluation akin to managing the debt crisis of a small nation. Roo and Cayenne were in the Grandersons’ basement waiting for everyone else to come back.
“I heard you were fighting Derek McGuinness after school last week.” Cayenne was looking carefully between each of her toes, but Roo assumed she was talking to him anyway since he was the only one in the room. And since he had been fighting Derek McGuinness last week.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah you were?”
“What do you care?”
“Guys who fight are sexy.” Cayenne shrugged. “Not like guys who fight with knives or wrestling or if they just go around beating people up. But guys who fight just sometimes.” She paused to consider. “I bet Ben never fought anyone in his life.”
“He fights me all the time,” said Roo.
“Who wins?”
Roo snorted.
“I heard he called you gay and that’s why you kicked his ass.”
Roo wouldn’t look at her. “I didn’t kick his ass.”
“Did he call you gay?”
“Among other things.”
“Are you gay?”
“None of your business.”
“You can tell me if you are, you know. I don’t care. I have an uncle who’s gay. And I’m good at keeping secrets.” Roo looked up at her. “If you’re not though, you should tell me that too.”
“Why?”
She raised her eyes from her toes but not her head so that she was looking up at him through her lashes. “It opens up some options. For both of us.”
When everyone came back downstairs, bedecked dogs included, to watch the movie Rigel and Orion had finally settled on, Cayenne wanted to play Spin the Bottle instead.
“Uh, no?” Roo and Ben said together, their voices rising at the end as if there were a question. Roo’s was: Is this girl serious? Ben’s was: Why does she want to kiss anyone but me? Instead of working that out, he tackled Roo so they could wrestle out the jinx. Roo won.
“Why not?” Cayenne looked incredulous that anyone would deny her anything.
“Kissing is gross,” said Poppy.
“There’s four of them and three of us,” said Cayenne. “We can sit boy girl boy girl. It’s perfect.”
“If you’re heterosexist,” said Ben mildly.
“Or incestuous,” said Roo, less mildly.
“You can’t have everything.” Cayenne shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get lucky, and your spin will land on me.”
“I don’t want to make out with you,” said Roo.
“More than you want to make out with anyone else in this room,” said Rigel.
“True,” Roo admitted, “but not by much.”
Aggie and Poppy didn’t really understand Spin the Bottle and weren’t interested in anyone kissing anyone, blood-related or otherwise, so maybe it was topical or maybe it came out of nowhere when Aggie turned suddenly to Poppy and said, “Do you think it’s weird your parents only had boys?” And Poppy’s heart stopped. “I mean until you.”
“Your parents only had girls,” Poppy managed.