Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [2]
“Ya know what I been thinkin’, Sal?” my sister asks.
We’re sitting on the back steps of the house. I’m raring to go, but she’s working hard to loop her new shoelaces into bunny ears. Troo was in the crash with Daddy. She played peek-a-boo with him on the way home from the baseball game. Holding her hands over his eyes for longer than she shoulda is what caused the car to go skidding out of control and smash into the old oak tree on Holly Road. She got her arm fractured. It aches before it’s going to rain and also made her not very good at tying.
“What?” I ask her.
“It would be a fantastic idea for us to get away from the neighborhood for a while. We should go away to camp this summer,” she says, batting her morning-sky blue eyes at me.
My eyes are green and I don’t have hair the color of maple leaves in the fall the way Troo does. I have thick blond hair that my mother brushes too hard and puts into a fat braid that goes down my back and deep dimples that I’ve been told more than a few times are very darling. I’ve always had long legs, but this past year they grew three and a half inches. My sister thinks I look like a yellow flamingo.
“We need to expand our horizons,” Troo says.
Even though we don’t look very much alike, we are what people call Irish twins. Troo will turn eleven two months before I turn twelve. I always know what she is really thinking and feeling. We have mental telepathy. So that’s how come I know my sister isn’t telling me the truth about why she wants to go to camp. It’s not the neighborhood she wants to get away from. She likes living in the brick house with the fat-leafed ivy growing up the sides and bright red geraniums in the window boxes and lilacs falling over the picket fence like a purple waterfall. It’s the owner of the house Troo’s got problems with. She wants to get away from Dave Rasmussen, who we moved in with at the end of last summer. He is my real father because when Daddy was in the war Mother accidentally had some of the sex with Dave.
For the longest time, I didn’t know that Dave was my flesh and blood. When I found out, I didn’t think I would get over it, but I mostly have, in my mind anyway. In my heart, Daddy is still my daddy and Dave is Dave. Maybe someday that will change for me, but it never will for my sister. Daddy will always be her one and only. He looked at her like she was a slice of banana cream pie. I was his second-favorite, plain old dependable cherry, and that was fine with me. When you got a sister like Troo, you gotta expect these things.
“I don’t want to expand anywhere,” I tell her. “My horizons are fine.”
“Yeah, that’s what you think, but Mrs. Kambowski told me that a person should get out and see the world whenever they can,” Troo tells me in her know-it-all voice that is not my favorite. “She said that travel is très chic.”
“She’s wrong.” Mrs. Kambowski is the boss of the Finney Library who won’t stop teaching my sister these French words no matter how many times I politely ask her to stop. “Ya know as good as me that goin’ someplace you’ve never been before can turn out really bad,” I remind Troo. “Remember what happened to Julie Adams in the Creature from the Black Lagoon when she went to the Amazon? And what about Sky King? He always gets into trouble when he goes flyin’ off into the horizon.” Daddy and I never missed that show because he was a pilot, too. “And . . . and what about all the bad stuff that happened to us when we moved from the country to the city?”
“I knew you’d say that,” she says with a smile that can bring the dead back to life. She inherited it from Daddy. He gave her her nickname, too. After she got a rusty nail pulled out of her heel and didn’t even flinch, he started calling her “a real trouper” and then because that took too long to say we began to call her Trooper and then shortened it even more. Her real name is Margaret. I also call her my Troo genius because she is really smart. She