In the car, I tell James about how Ethan turned out to be David’s brother.
“Well, that sucks,” James says. His car purrs under his skillful handling. I like watching his hand work the shift—it’s kind of sexy, but I’m not going to overthink the metaphor. “Guess you’ll have to keep looking.”
“Nah. Ethan’s totally sweet.”
“How is that possible if he’s that douchebag’s brother?”
“Siblings can be really different. Look at me and Ivy.”
“Yeah, but you guys are different because she’s messed up.”
My face feels suddenly hot. “She’s not messed up.”
“Sorry.” He takes his hand off the stick shift so he can pat my leg briefly. “You know what I mean.”
For a moment, I think about being sullen and saying that no, I don’t know what he means, that calling my sister “messed up” is really lousy.
But I don’t want to be that girl, the one who takes everything too seriously and has weird reactions to things. I’ve never wanted to be that girl. I want to be the cool, fun—and, yes, hot girl—who doesn’t think too deeply about anything at all, at least not when she’s with her adorable boyfriend.
So I just change the subject, ask him to tell me about the game he played that morning, and when he says, “We won!” I tell him he’s awesome and that I wish I’d been there to cheer him on.
The movie we want to see is sold out, so James buys us tickets to our second choice, which turns out to be about as good as you’d expect a second choice movie to be.
We split up to use the bathroom before heading out into the mall to grab some dinner. I check my texts while I’m waiting for an empty stall and see one from a number I don’t recognize.
Ethan wants another date with your sister. He’s texting her but wanted me to text you too
I’m almost at the front of the line, so I quickly write back I’ll check with Ivy when I get home and leave it at that. I’m glad Ethan’s eager to see Ivy again. I just hope she’s as enthusiastic about seeing him.
“Again?” she says when I bring it up the next morning. “We just had frozen yogurt.”
“I know. He must have had a lot of fun. We’re probably talking next weekend anyway—so it’s not right away.”
“You have to drive me and stay again. I don’t want to go alone.”
I’m just glad she wants to go at all, so I promise to chauffeur and hover over her as she and Ethan text back and forth for a while. I check her texts before she sends them to make sure she doesn’t say something super rude or awkward.
I’m very happy, he writes, when they finally settle on going bowling that Saturday.
“He’s so sweet,” I say.
“Is James sweet?”
“Totally.”
“Is that why you like him?”
“That and his enormous biceps.”
Her brow furrows. “His arm muscles?”
“Yeah. I like the way they look. And feel.”
“I don’t want to touch Ethan’s biceps,” she says, her eyes flickering about the room in sudden panic.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re not up to the biceps-touching part of the relationship yet. And by the time you are, you may be more into the idea.”
She just shakes her head.
Well, Mom definitely doesn’t need to be worried about Ivy’s rushing into having casual sex. Right now that seems about as likely as her landing the starring role in Channing Tatum’s next romantic comedy.
I wish I could ask David if Ethan’s equally nervous about the physical stuff, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that.
Why couldn’t Ethan’s brother be someone I could talk to? I feel so alone in this.
In Camp’s class on Monday, David briefly looks up from his laptop as I walk past him, and we nod at each other. Even that tiny acknowledgment of each other’s existence feels weird.
Camp assigns a paper for Friday, and at lunch we all complain that it’s way too much work.
“Maybe Camp’s really evil,” Sarah says. “Maybe this whole I love teaching kids is a cover for her sadism.”
“She probably has a dungeon in her house,” Jacob Gordon says. “With all sorts of sick tortures and handcuffs and shit.”
“Yeah, and that’s why she wears skirts with those big pockets,” Sarah says with a giggle. “She keeps cattle prods and Tasers in there.”
“I bet she has leather versions of those skirts for when she’s working in the dungeon,” he says.
“Yeah, that’s sexy,” James says. “Big shapeless skirts made out of leather.”
“Look who’s getting turned on thinking about the Campster,” Jacob says.
“Right,” James says. “That lady is hot.”
“Get in line,” Jacob says. “Those saggy boobs are all mine.”
They laugh, but I don’t. They’re being too mean. Camp’s a good teacher, and she’s always nice to us. And there’s something innocent and vulnerable about her that makes me want to protect her. Something almost Ivy-like.
I don’t say anything, though. Just eat my lunch and wait for them to talk about something else.
Twelve
THE DAY BEFORE Ethan and Ivy’s date, I get nervous about the fact it’s at a bowling alley— Ivy doesn’t do well with loud noises.
“Have you ever been to one before?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
I’ve been a bunch of times, but it was always for other kids’ birthday parties. Ivy doesn’t go to a lot of parties. Or any, really. I explain how noisy they can get with all the crashing pins and all. “You going to be okay with that?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Should I tell Ethan I don’t want to go?”
“Wait—I have an idea.” I find some videos online of people bowling, and I play them for her, increasing the volume with each one until it’s as loud as I can make it. It’s still not as loud as the real thing, but at least it gives her a sense of the kind of noise she’ll be dealing with.
She doesn’t mind watching the videos and, in fact, looks for more on her own and plays them at top volume in our room until Ron yells from the master bedroom that he can’t hear himself think.
Then she puts on her headphones and listens to them some more.
The desensitization actually works. As soon as we walk inside the bowling alley, the noise is pretty intense. Ivy winces and her hands float up toward her ears, but then they pause and drop down at her sides again.
“Bowling alleys are always noisy,” she informs me. “But it’s okay. It’s just the ball hitting the pins.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I don’t like the noise, but I can live with it.”
“Me too,” she says.
The guys are waiting for us at the front desk. Ethan comes forward eagerly and reaches toward Ivy. I’m not sure what he’s going for—hug? Handshake? Kiss? It doesn’t matter: Ivy ducks away, and his hand lands on her arm, which he pats awkwardly.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” she says. “I don’t know how to do bowling.”
I should have told her before that you don’t “do” bowling. I just assumed she knew.
“That’s okay,” Ethan says. “I can teach you. I’m good at it.”
David says, “We already got a lane. You guys just need to get your shoes.”
“Are we bowling too?” I ask him.
“Might as well. We’re stuck here, right? Or are you leaving?”
“No, don’t!” Ivy clutches at my arm.
“Guess I’m staying.” I knew as soon as I saw David there that Ivy wouldn’t let me leave.
“Here’s where you get the shoes,” Ethan says, and leads Ivy away.
David says in a low voice, “If we play against them, they can be on a team together instead of bowling against each other. It’s probably better that way—Ethan can get competitive.”
I nod. Not a bad idea.
After Ivy and I give our sizes to the overweight, balding guy behind the counter, he slaps a couple of pairs of bowling shoes down in front of us. I notice a sign on the wall saying they’re hiring and ask him what the job is.
“You really interested?” He gives me an up and down sort of look.
“Sure.”
“It’s an old sign, but you never know—people come and go a lot. Something might open up. I’ll get you an application.” He goes into the back room.
“You don’t want to work here,” David says.
The guy comes back with the application before I can respond, so I wait until we’ve moved over to the nearby bench to put on our shoes to ask him why not.
“Well, first of all there’s the noise,” he says.
“It’s probably better in the back office.”
“Maybe. But did you see the way that guy looked at you when he handed you the application? This place would be a daily creepfest for a girl who looks like you.”
“A girl who looks like me? What does that mean?”
“You know,” he says irritably.
“Do I?”
He turns away and asks Ivy how the bowling shoes feel.
“Weird,” she says.
Ethan says, “Are they too small? The first pair I tried on was too small, but the second pair felt okay. I’m usually a ten, but here I’m a ten and a half. Do you want me to get you a bigger size?”
“I don’t know. They just feel weird.” Ivy’s worn the same brand of sneakers for the last five years and hates wearing any other shoes. It’s always an issue when we need her to get dressed up.
“Mine feel weird too,” I say. “But we’re not wearing them for long—let’s not worry about it.”
“Come pick out your balls,” David says, and leads us to the racks.
I reach for a pretty blue and white one. “Perfect! It matches my shirt.”
“You have to check the weight and finger holes.”
“No! I want this one.” I hug it defiantly against my chest. He rolls his eyes.
Ethan says to Ivy, “I could pick one out for you if you want.”
“Okay.”
“I use a pretty big one, but I think you should have one that’s not as heavy.”
“Girls can be strong too, you know,” I say to Ethan.
“I know!” he says, raising his voice. “I know girls can be strong!”
“Relax,” David says. “Chloe was just joking. Help Ivy with her ball.”
“Okay.” Ethan shoots an annoyed look at me before turning back to the balls. He selects a dark blue glittery one and says to Ivy, “See if this fits.”
She touches the ball uncertainly, sliding her palm over the finger holes. “What do you mean?”
Ethan shows her how to put her fingers in the holes and then loftily declares that the ball is too big for her. He picks out another one that he says will be better. He drops it into Ivy’s arms, and the weight makes her sag forward.
“Too heavy?” he asks.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“It’s the lightest one they have.”
“Then it’s fine,” I say impatiently. The ball selection already feels like it’s taken forever. I don’t want to spend my entire Saturday in a dark noisy place that smells like sweat and fried food. “Just take it, Ivy. And stand up straight. It’s not that heavy. What’s our lane number?”
“Eleven,” Ethan says. “Between ten and twelve.” He leads us over there. “We need to make teams.”
David jumps in. “Chloe and me against you and Ivy.”
Ethan looks delighted, but Ivy says, “Can’t I be with Chloe?”
“No,” I say. I’m worried she’ll hurt Ethan’s feelings. “It’s more even this way—they’re both better than us.”
She looks like she might cry, and I want to shake her. Why can’t she be nicer to Ethan? She’s not stupid—she knows that this is sort of a date and that he’s happy to be on a team with her. It’s embarrassing that she’s acting like this, especially with David there watching and understanding far more than his brother.
“Let’s just try it this way,” I say. It’s always best to keep things moving forward with Ivy. Too much time to think, and she finds reasons to feel anxious. “You guys can go first. Who wants to keep score? I don’t remember how to.”
“I’ll do it,” David says. He drops into the chair behind the table, and I nab the only other chair, next to him, leaving the bench for the other two. “Ethan, you’re up.”
“Ivy can go first,” Ethan says gallantly.
“I don’t know how to,” she says.
“I’ll help.” He guides her fingers into the holes before leading her to the bowling line. “Hold it in both hands and then one hand and then roll it,” he says.
She lowers the ball to the floor, pulls her fingers out of the holes, and pushes at it. It rolls slowly into the gutter.
“What we have here,” David whispers to me, “is a failure to communicate.”
Ivy’s next attempt doesn’t go any better than her first one; she doesn’t manage to knock down a single pin with that ball either.
“That’s okay,” Ethan says, patting her shoulder as they watch her ball slowly—sloooowwwllyyy—roll along the gutter and eventually vanish into the back.
Ivy chews at her lip. “I’m bad at this. I didn’t get any points.”
“I was bad my first time,” he says.
“When was that?”
“I was really little.”
“Do you want another turn?” David asks her. “It’s fine with us.”
She shakes her head vehemently. “No! That would be cheating!” She and Ethan come back to the table. Her face is bright red, and she’s thumping her hands against her thighs.
“It’s fine, Ivy,” I say. “We’re all bad at this.”
“I’m not bad at it,” Ethan says. “I’m quite good.”
It’s funny how sometimes you can tell that someone’s autistic from a short sentence that’s not even technically wrong in any way.
I get up. “My turn.”
They sit down while I cradle my ball and survey the lane. Then I send both my balls wobbling into the gutter. I don’t knock down a single pin.
I turn around with an indifferent shrug and a cheerful “oh, well!”
Ivy’s mouth is wide open. “Chloe! You’re so bad at this! I thought you knew how to do it.”
“I thought so too. Guess I forgot how hard it is.”
“It’s okay,” Ethan says. “Don’t worry about it, Chloe. You’re still tied with us.”
“Yeah.” Ivy sits up, her face brightening. “We’re tied.”
I slip back into the chair next to David.
“Bad luck,” he says gravely.
“The worst,” I agree.
Ethan’s up next. He really is a decent bowler—better than me, anyway, even when I’m not deliberately aiming for the gutter. He just misses the spare and has to settle for eight pins down.
Then it’s David’s turn. He easily knocks down seven pins with his first ball but sends his second sailing into the empty space between the remaining pins.
When he returns to his chair, I whisper, “Takes a lot of skill to knock down exactly the number of pins you want to.”
“Yeah,” he whispers back. “Would have been easier to get a spare.” He records his score.
Ethan gets up when Ivy does and watches from a foot away as she bowls.
Her first ball is a flop, and you can tell she’s bummed, but her second one creaks slowly down the alley and actually manages to nip off two pins before disappearing. She gasps, and Ethan pats her shoulder, saying, “That’s so good!”
I hit four pins with my first ball and aim for the gutter with my second.
And so it goes.
David and I work hard to stay within a point or two of our siblings’ scores, which turns out to be just as challenging as trying to get a strike every time—and maybe m
ore fun? The team scores stay close, and Ivy loses her worried look. She even starts to jump up eagerly when it’s her turn.
Ethan cheers for her every time, raising his arms and pumping his fists into the air when she knocks down a pin. She happily high-fives him after each of their turns.
David and I don’t bother with the high-fives, but we do shoot amused glances at each other following the success or failure of our attempts to keep the score as even as possible. At one point, he gets a strike, and the others congratulate him, but he whispers to me when he sits down that he’s pissed at his bad aim: he was trying to knock down nine pins, not ten.
“I suck,” he says with disgust. “No control.”
Because of that strike, he and I end up winning, but only by a couple of points, and Ethan and Ivy take it well.
“We’ll beat them next time,” Ethan says to her.
“We might not,” she says.
Thirteen
“IT’S ACTUALLY GOOD we won,” David says to me a couple of minutes later. He and I are making a pilgrimage to the vending machines at the far end of the bowling alley to score some sodas and snacks before the next game. “Don’t want them to think we’re not trying.”
“It’s sort of like we invented a whole new game,” I say. “Trying to get just the right number of points without getting too many.”
“We’re like Harold Swerg.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know Harold Swerg?”
“Is he in our grade?”
He laughs. I’ve never seen David Fields laugh before. Amazingly, the earth doesn’t stop turning.
“Not a kid,” he says. “A character in a Jules Feiffer cartoon. You know Feiffer’s stuff?”
“I think so?”
“He did the illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth. You ever read that?”
“Oh, right! Okay, I know exactly who he is.”
We reach the vending machines and stand side by side, studying the choices, while he explains. “So he made this cartoon about a guy named Harold Swerg, who’s, like, the greatest athlete in the world at every single sport. And he gets sent to the Olympics, and the Americans are really excited because he’s going to win for them. Only he doesn’t win. He ties at everything—even the long jump. Everyone’s mad at him for not winning, but he says he wasn’t trying to win, that he was trying to tie, and that tying is much harder than winning.”