He wouldn’t come out of his room. Unlike Freddy, he’d remembered to drag furniture in front of the door. They couldn’t get in, and he couldn’t hear them knocking and calling. “Serve him right if the house catches on fire,” said Mel. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I think he’s panicking,” said Freddy. Strangely enough, she could sympathise. She hadn’t been any more reasonable when she and Josiah had fallen through time. It was funny, though, how … well, how young Roland was acting. She was having to struggle not to think of him as Mel’s age. In the past, he’d always seemed older than her, even though he was really several months younger.
They left him alone because they had to, but they returned to the room at intervals to see if the furniture was gone yet. It never was. In the meantime, Mel picked up the Coleridge book, which Freddy had put back on the chair in the kitchen. “I want to study the poem you interrupted,” she said. “Maybe there’s a clue in it.” Freddy could have told her there wasn’t, but there was no harm in Mel reading the poem. She couldn’t seem to do anything herself but pace. Everything was ordinary and strange all at once. She walked all around the house, aimlessly, as Mel set about dissecting “Kubla Khan.”
While they were up at Roland’s room for the fourth time, they heard a door open and close downstairs.
Mel and Freddy looked at each other. “Who’s that?” said Mel.
From downstairs, a voice called, “Kids? Pizza for dinner!”
Mel’s mouth dropped open in horror. Freddy scrambled to remember the last time she had eaten dinner with Mum and Jordan. It didn’t help that she had lived an extra eighteen months in the interim.
“I was defrosting some chicken,” said Mel. “We’ll have to cook it later. Why do they want to eat dinner with us now?”
They tiptoed cautiously downstairs. Jordan was setting the table; Mum had opened the two pizza boxes. She glanced at Freddy and Mel. “Hi, guys,” she said. “Hungry?”
“Uh,” said Freddy, standing in full view, feeling huge and exposed.
“We’ve got pepperoni and Hawaiian,” said Jordan. “Take your pick.” Mum smiled and helped herself to a slice.
Freddy moved into the room. Jordan looked at her, then back at his plate. “Good day?” he said.
“Uh,” said Freddy again.
“Yeah. Absolutely. Good day. How was yours?” said Mel in a chirpy, breathless voice that should have made Mum and Jordan instantly suspicious.
“Not bad,” said Jordan. “Where’s Roland?”
“Barricaded in his room,” said Mel. “He can’t hear us when we knock, obviously.”
“He’ll come down when he’s hungry,” said Mum. “Did you have fun in school today, Freddy?”
“I got beat up in gym class, then again after school,” said Freddy.
Both Jordan and Mum turned to look at her properly. “You don’t look as if you’ve been beat up,” said Jordan.
“Uh,” said Freddy for the third time. Something inside her seemed to be getting more and more clenched.
“You do look a little different,” said Mum. “Did you change your hair?”
“Did I what?” said Freddy.
“You haven’t dyed it, have you?” said Mum. “You know we don’t want you girls doing that.”
“No,” said Freddy.
“Oh, good,” said Mum, biting into her pizza.
“I mean no, I didn’t know that. You didn’t tell us.”
“Didn’t we? Jordan, I’ve been meaning to ask you—”
“No,” said Freddy, much more forcefully.
“What’s wrong with you, Freddy?” said Jordan. “Aren’t you going to have any pizza?”
They were both looking at her with concerned expressions. She thought they were just expressions; there was nothing behind them. Mum and Jordan were sitting there staring straight at her, and neither one had noticed she had gained a year and a half in age.
She opened her mouth to say, What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you really see us? You don’t, do you? You’ve taken yourselves off into your own little lives, whatever those are, and we’re just these … extras you happen to have at home. You don’t think you think of us like that. You think you’re ordinary parents who love us and look after us. You’ve written this little story inside your heads about how we fit into your lives. And so when you come home unexpectedly with pizza, it seems normal to you, even though we’re standing here watching you as if you’re aliens because we haven’t all sat down to dinner together in forever. And the best part of the whole thing is that you’re really seeing me right now—I mean, really looking at me and seeing me—but because you haven’t really seen me for months or even years before this, you can’t tell that anything’s different. You need to start treating us like real people. You need to get mad at us when we do stupid things like barricade ourselves in our rooms instead of coming down to dinner. I mean, it’s not as if any of us has ever done anything really bad, but our rooms could be overflowing with drugs and pornography, and you wouldn’t even notice. You don’t even know who we are. You’re terrible parents. You didn’t have a right to move on from us when you got divorced. I’m sure you’re very busy, but you need to grow up.
What came out was, “Yeah, okay.”
Mel caught her eye. Freddy looked away.
The pizza was surprisingly good.
20
“So,” said Josiah the next morning on the way to school, “how’d it go?”
She didn’t want to have to deal with Josiah right now. Her stomach muscles had cramped up when she’d seen him waiting for her on the verge of the park. They had all but told him yesterday that they knew who Three was. Something’s going to happen today, thought Freddy. It wasn’t going to be a good something. She had to talk to Roland, who had avoided her all morning; he had either left extremely early or hidden in his room until she was gone.
Josiah was still waiting, not very patiently. “You saw,” she said, keeping her voice casual.
“Yes,” said Josiah, “I saw you all standing on our back stoop, claiming you were Three. What did you tell them?”
“The truth.”
He glanced at her sidelong. “I get a funny feeling you know who Three is and have decided not to tell me. Care to elaborate?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, this should be fun,” said Josiah drily. “You’ve got the wrong idea, you know. There’s nothing bad about being Three. It’s just one little choice.”
“Sure.”
“Have it your way.” His eyes moved down to her legs. “Nice pants.”
Despite the knot in her insides, Freddy felt her lips quirk. She had put her borrowed clothes in the wash, then belatedly discovered she had nothing to wear but her old stuff, which no longer fit her at all. She was wearing her largest pair of jeans. They barely closed at the waist, hugged her hips and thighs so tightly she could hardly sit down, and extended about halfway down her calves. Tight pants were in right now, but not short tight pants. She’d briefly considered borrowing something from Mel, but that would have been worse. In a pair of Mel’s pants, she would have appeared to be wearing baggy knickerbockers.