The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [112]
But Bean had barely been given this chance—maybe twice, three times. Our parents were out of town, our father speaking at a conference where serious professors would assiduously take notes on each pearl he cast before them, and then go drinking in the hotel bar, stumbling to their rooms full of wine and paled purpose. Our grandparents were with us, but Nana and Pop-Pop had long ago reached the age where their bedtimes aligned with ours, and the excitement of the change in the house had made us too wired to sleep.
Rose was in bed, lost in the world of Treasure Island, when she heard Bean and Cordy giggling in the next room. Their growing friendship frightened her, made her freeze, terrified of being left behind. Throwing back the sheet, clean and white in the cast of the reading lamp, she placed her toes on the floor and padded over to Bean’s room. The door stood open, a wedge of light pooling on the hall floor, and she hesitated, hand on the knob, before she opened it and slipped in, the squeak of the hinges announcing her arrival.
Bean and Cordy were changing, bodies still flat and futile, slipping on jeans and T-shirts and sneakers.
“Come on,” Bean said to Rose, for if we made her our ally, she would not stop us. “We’re going to the Deee-Lite.”
“Now?” Rose asked. Whatever she had pictured us getting up to, certainly it had not been this. “It’ll take an hour to walk there.” The Deee-Lite was at the other end of town, where the houses turned to cornfields, all dark and empty at that time of year.
Bean and Cordy turned to each other and giggled. Cordy slipped on her shoes. “We’re taking the car,” she said, and for some reason, this struck us as hilarious again, and we laughed so hard we thought for sure Nana and Pop-Pop would wake up.
Of course Rose tried to talk us out of it, but there was something about that night, about the snap of fall in the air—the Deee-Lite would close for the winter the next week (a regular occurrence, not our fault)—about the freedom we felt with our parents far away and our grandparents innocently asleep down the hall. And we think it had something to do with the three of us alone together, so rare and beautiful that it made our insides hum like the strings of a guitar.
But when she saw we were going with or without her, she decided to come. To keep us safe, she said.
And now that we think about it, how stupid were we? How foolish was it for three girls, only one of whom had any real driving experience to speak of, none of it at night, all far too young to be going out into the darkness where there were boys in fast cars and girls in short skirts dragging the strip, in search of a little danger to break the monotony? We have now done a million things more foolish than that night, but it still makes us shake our heads.
But we didn’t know that then. All we knew was that we were wild and venturesome, and the night was ours, and there was power in the three of us, the Weird Sisters, hand in hand.
Rose made a big deal out of everyone taking her jacket, as though it were some sort of talisman, a charm against the sheer idiocy of our action. And she knew it was crazy and stupid, and completely unlike her, and conceivably that is why she agreed to go along with it.
When we had all dressed, we went out the front door, holding our breath as we walked on the boards that were sure to creak and betray us, opening the heavy door and hearing the aching squeal of the screen door, not yet taken down from summer. Rose carried the keys, because we had bargained that she would drive. She had never actually started the car before, and she let the engine grind hard for a moment before she took her hand off the key and found the headlights and we pulled out into the darkness.
Bean had called shotgun and was flipping through the radio stations, something that, typically, was absolutely Not Allowed, until she found a pop song she liked, and we rolled down the