Good Graces - Lesley Kagen [5]
That’s why I’ve been spending my nights tossing and turning even worse than I usually do, which I didn’t think was humanly possible. Standing watch over my sister is never easy and she hasn’t been any help at all. She giggles along with the other girls when they tease me about the dark circles I’ve got under my eyes. No matter how deep I stick my fingers in my ears, I can hear them calling me “Smudgy” and telling each other how camp is the greatest and that they never want to go home, which makes me feel even more like the odd maiden out because that’s all I want to do. I miss . . . everything. Troo doesn’t. She’s been having a gay old time making sit-upons and new friends and practicing her ventriloquist act for The Heap Big Talent Show, which is tonight.
I know that I’m not good at a lot of things, not like Troo is, but I do my best after my sister drags me up on the camp stage and growls into my ear, “You’re embarassin’ me. Again. Do one of your dumb imitations.”
So I try to perform my best Edgar G. Robinson, “You dirty rat,” but my tongue gets so twisted up that it comes out sounding like, “You thirty brats,” which makes everybody boo, and one kid, who is my sister, throws a stick of beef jerky at me. Of course, after all is said and done, Troo wins the top talent prize, The Golden Tomahawk, hands down. Nobody even cares that her lips moved.
By the time Sunday comes, I am very weak, almost floppy. I got a nose ache from pressing it against the cabin window counting the minutes until Dave’s woody station wagon comes roaring up the camp drive to rescue me.
When I finally spot him, I try to yell, “He’s here! He’s here!” but I hardly have enough air left in me to sigh out to Troo, “We’re goin’ home.”
“You are. I don’t got a home anymore,” she hollers on her run out the cabin door.
She hides in a tree and refuses to budge, but Dave is brave and tells her that she has until the count of three to get down. That takes a lotta guts on his part because he knows Troo will give him the cold shoulder all the way home. Or maybe that’s why he nixed the staying-longer-at-camp idea in the first place. Just to shut her up. I love my sister, I would die for her, but a spade is a spade. Troo is a smart alec, most especially to Dave, who she reminds, “You’re not my real father,” in case he forgot after she said it a half hour ago.
On the drive home, once Troo falls asleep against my shoulder hugging The Golden Tomahawk, I tap Dave on the shoulder and tell him, “Thank you for sendin’ us! That was really something!”
The reason I am not telling him that camp was the fourth-worst experience of my life behind losing Daddy and Mother almost dying and Bobby trying to murder me is because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Dave is a lot like me in the personality department. That’s who I get it from. Not from my mother, who says, “Being sensitive and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.”
But when he parks the woody station wagon in front of our house on 52nd Street, since he is a police detective, Dave mighta deduced that I didn’t tell him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but about my camping experience. Because after Troo stomps off in a huff, I can’t stop myself from leaping out of the car, sinking down on my knees and kissing our front lawn, that’s how grateful I am to get back to the city where I know who lives in what house, which shortcuts we shouldn’t take and, most important, all the best hiding places.
Chapter Three
The first day back home, my sister and me and one of our best friends, Mary Lane, are having what Troo calls a rendezvous at Washington Park, the most important place to everybody in the neighborhood next to Mother of Good Hope Church. The park’s got everything.
Like the lagoon.
I used to love standing under the weeping willow and throwing in a hook, but I had to give that up. Instead of whiling away an afternoon dreaming about what I’m gonna catch, all I can think