The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [14]
“Ava!” Dad said. “No bodily contact.”
Granddad was studying his tree with a pensive expression on his whiskery face, probably wishing he lived in a nursing home.
“I didn’t do anything!” Ava yelled from the hallway. “I just accidentally bumped into her.”
“Liar!” Suzi, relieved to be the one wronged, howled, held her scalp, and burst into tears.
Mom told Suzi that she had provoked Ava and so she was grounded until further notice. “We all see what you’re doing,” Mom told Suzi, “and we all know why you’re doing it.” She looked at Suzi like she hated her.
“How do you know? You can’t read my mind.” Suzi bawled harder and ran from the room and down the hall. She slammed her door shut and threw herself on her bed. Her wailing, now muffled, continued. She’d started the whole thing, it was true, and she’d been mean and even disgusting, picking on poor defenseless Ava, but she felt like she’d exposed some deep truth that they all needed to face, and there was some relief in that.
This was the truth: her own mother didn’t like her.
From Ava’s room, Elvis sang with bold abandon: “Ta-reet me like a fool, / Ta-reet me mean and cruel, / But love me.”
I’m not a bad person, she wanted to tell her mother, and she didn’t think she was, really, only why did she feel compelled to pick on Ava? Sometimes she really didn’t blame her mother for hating her. She promised herself she’d never pick on Ava again. But couldn’t Ava listen to something else once in a while? Even someone else old and embarrassing, like Frank Sinatra?
And her mother had actually encouraged Ava’s obsession with Elvis by taking her to Memphis to see Graceland over Christmas break. Only Ava was allowed to go, and since then, Ava’d been even more fixated on the King, and her mother had come back talking about her own mother, who had left her when she was a little baby, not even a year old. Her mother had started asking Granddad lots of questions about her mother, but Granddad didn’t have answers and her mother cried awhile about that, saying that when she was in Memphis she kept thinking about her mother and feeling down.
Well, hello! Suzi wanted to yell at her mother. How do you think I feel! You’ve never loved me like you do Ava. But she felt bad for her mother, too, because she knew what it felt like to miss your mother’s love.
After a while she started fishing around in her shorts pocket for some Kleenex, but instead she found the card with Nance’s phone number. She held it and looked at it a minute, and then, without even thinking about it, got up and walked back into the kitchen, where her parents were sitting, glaring at each other and then at Suzi. Granddad and Otis had disappeared.
She handed the card to her mother and explained how she’d met this nice old lady out walking her dog and that she was from Memphis and really cool and she really liked Suzi and thought Suzi was special. “She invited me to go to Italy with her,” Suzi explained. “We’re going to stay in a villa in Tuscany. At the end of the summer. Can I go?”
“And miss soccer camp?” said her father, acting like the trip was a joke.
But she wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t a joke, not to her. “I said at the end of summer. August.”
Her mother was looking at the card, and she glanced up at Suzi. “Why would she want to take you?”
“That’s real nice,” Suzi said, hurt, of course, but grimly gratified to have more evidence.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said her mother. “What I meant was, she doesn’t even know you. It’s kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“No,” Suzi said, even though strange was exactly the word for it.
“She can tell you’re fun to hang out with, I guess!” her mother said, smiling like it hurt her face.
“I guess.”
Her mother sighed, can’t do anything right, and studied the card again. “Nancy Archer. Wonderful name.”
“It sounds made up,” Dad said, but nobody ever listened to him.
He never would’ve hooked up with Gigi if his