Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [13]
I try never to lie to Henry, so I don’t tell him, I doubt very much if I’ll be seeing you again anytime soon because I’m going to be too busy protecting my sister every minute of every day. I don’t want him to get upset because he sometimes gets a nosebleed if he does, so I say to him the same thing I always do after one of our visits, “Thanks for the phosphate. It’s the best I ever had.”
When Troo doesn’t pay Henry a compliment the way she should, I nudge her.
“Thanks for the soda, Onree,” she says. “It wasn’t that bad.” She’s got a chocolate mustache, but I don’t lick my finger and dab it off the way a good sister should. I have had just about all I can take from Troo O’Malley this morning. (Sorry, Daddy. I know you’re watching, but enough is enough.)
Mr. Fitzpatrick calls again from the back of the store, “Son?”
Before Henry disappears all the way down aisle two to see what his dad wants, he stops and blows me a kiss.
“Awww, isn’t that sweet,” my sister says, drippy. “Ya done?” She grabs the soda glass out of my hand and before I can stop her she guzzles down what I got left.
“Troo!” I get her by the shoulders and stare deep into her eyes because you can really tell a lot about a person when you do that. The windows to her soul are twinkling, but not in the way regular people’s do when they’re feeling good about something. Hers have a steely glint. She doesn’t care that Molinari is seven years older or weighs a hundred pounds more. She’s already thinking about the best way to go about capturing him, I know she is. Greasy Al might want revenge, but so does she, and she won’t back down. She doesn’t know how. “You’re comin’ up with one of your plans, aren’t you,” I say.
“Whatta ya mean?” she says, like she just flew down from heaven, real angelic like that.
“You know what I mean, Trooper,” I say, slipping off my stool with this certain kind of feeling I’ve got all the time lately. I can’t stop thinking there’s something bad waiting for me around the corner with wide-open arms and no matter how many details I pay attention to, no matter how prepared I am, I can’t stop it from grabbing me or even worse, Troo.
My sister doesn’t snap her dime down on the marble counter the way I just did. She picks up her Golden Tomahawk bag and strolls past me out the drugstore door with a cherry-on-the-top grin. In the back pocket of her shorts, I can see the outline of a pack of L&Ms.
Chapter Five
Just like the park, where the O’Malley sisters are this morning is another important place to be in the neighborhood—Vliet Street School playground. The school is three stories high and made out of brick with a flat roof and a lotta doors, but none of us cares about that. It’s the blacktop we’re interested in. The heat comes off it in waves. And it’s not only the way it looks that reminds me of a bottomless sea. It’s the kids. Even if the last thing on your mind is playing a game of Statue Maker or Captain May I you can get lured over here by their happy sounds the same way those sailors did by those singing sirens the nuns taught us about when they covered the importance of resisting temptation. (Those sailors ended up dead, which is a word to the wise.)
The playground is about a block wide, so there is plenty of room to get together all kinds of games. Boys take off their shirts at the basketball court, which I have nothing to do with. Troo does. She likes any games that you play with balls. There are yellow-painted hopscotches and four-squares and flat green wooden benches that you can sit on if you want to play checkers or best of all, braid lanyards underneath the one shade tree, which I warned everybody is going to die soon if they don’t stop carving their initials