Big Girl Small by Rachel Dewoskin Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t want to go back inside and listen or watch anymore, so I called Chad from the lawn and while I waited for him I looked up at the blanket of stars hanging over Ann Arbor. A fall chill was already in the air and it smelled dark like winter: crisp leaves burning and the snow that’s about to come. I like that combination of smells, fire and an impending icy Midwestern season. I don’t think I could ever live anywhere that has constantly nice weather. The stars don’t look as good when it’s not cold. And places that have no transitions make you feel like change isn’t possible. I believe in change, even now, even after everything that’s happened. Maybe because I grew up in a place that can be scalding and freezing both.
    Chad came to get me in so little time that he must have been sitting around the corner in his car all night. I didn’t ask. He pretended he was about to “return” to a Michigan party, and then waited until I was safely inside our house before backing away. My parents were at the table, pretending they always have tea at midnight. Everyone in my family does a lot of pretending on my account. And I pretend not to notice.
    “Oh, hi, honey!” my mom said, all casual.
    “Hi, Judy. Did you have an okay time?” my dad asked.
    I looked at him closely, my sleepy-eyed dad, sitting there with my mom, who had definitely made him stay up waiting for me, because then they could look “natural” at the table, rather than worried. And I loved him very much at that moment.
    “It was good, Dad, thanks.”
    “Great, honey,” he said. “Well, I guess we’ll be turning in.”
    He stood to clear their teacups, but my mom kept her hand wrapped around hers.
    “Who was there?” she asked.
    “I don’t know, Mom, everyone, I guess.”
    “Have you met lots of new people?”
    I shrugged, opened the cabinet, and took out a package of Oreo cookies. Then I poured some milk and sat down. I took the tops off of three Oreos and stacked them up. I ate the open-faced ones, scraping the filling with my teeth. When I had finished those, I dipped the stacked tops in my milk one at a time.
    “I met a cool girl named Ginger,” I told my mom, “and one named Sarah.”
    This was something for her to hold on to—names. She relaxed and I excused myself and went to my bathroom, brushed my teeth, and looked in the mirror. In my room I put on black cotton pajamas with moons and stars on them and climbed into my bed next to the ratty monkey doll my grandma Mary got me when I was a baby. I named it Bunkey, which my mom says is because I was a genius who could rhyme, but is actually because I thought monkeys were called bunkeys until I was like eleven. I slapped Bunkey’s arm against my face while sucking my thumb so much that the arm fell off and had to be sewn back on two hundred times.
    I tried to sleep and couldn’t. So I got up and put my ear against the radiator in my floor. This is one of the ways I know my parents pretend all the time. Because I can hear bits of the truth through the vents in our house. My mom was talking endlessly about me, as usual, and my dad was either listening or sleeping. I felt for him.
    “—or whether it was what she actually did. Will they be—” My mom must have gone into the bathroom or something, because this was all I heard for the moment, but I kept my ear to the floor.
    She came back in the middle of a new sentence. “—safe. I don’t trust—”
    “She’s a good judge of character, Peggy,” my dad said. So he was awake.
    “I’m not sure,” my mom said, to my annoyance. “I don’t know where she was, or whether it was somewhere we wanted her to be.”
    “Then she’s just like kids everywhere.”
    “I’m going to ask her to tell me tomorrow—and not just—”
    “Don’t, Peggy. She needs space.”
    “I know that!” my mom snapped. “Don’t patronize me, or act like I’m not on her side. She’s—you know, she’s—in a different situation from everyone