It’s okay, I said. Who is he?
She blushed, crazily. Who is who?
The reason you are late, I said.
I had to study.
Mom stood in the door frame, but she wasn’t listening.
How was your math test? Mom said, brushing the side of her hair with a soupspoon.
Okay, said Hannah, glaring at me. I got an A.
What did you hear? she asked, dragging me aside and cutting into my arm with her budding nails.
Nothing, I said. Ow. I just guessed.
How? she said.
No reason, I said. Towels. Who is it?
She said no one, but then she barely ate at dinner, which is rare for her—usually I have to fight my way to the main dish to even get any, because she is so hungry—and that let me know she really liked him.
Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.
We didn’t get any more items for a few weeks. I started to miss them. I mean, I felt like I would die of claustrophobia and I had become paranoid about all things new coming into the house, including the bathwater exiting the faucet tap, and I had made a checklist for market items, shopping items, and all school items, but when I opened the refrigerator and saw all the same old stuff, I wanted to cry sometimes.
I left a few baits: I cleared my nightstand of all things, so that it was ready for a deposit. I bought a lobster soup with my own allowance, which made my mother shriek, but I assured her I’d bought it and I’d even saved the receipt to prove it. I brought it out of my bedroom, and she stared at the curling white paper and then looked at me, in the way she rarely did, eye to eye.
Are you okay, Lisa? she said. Ten-year-olds don’t usually save receipts.
I’m trying to trap a ghost, I said.
Would you like to go to the mall? she asked. Her eyes were tired. She looked pretty with tired eyes, so I didn’t mind so much.
We went to the nearest mall, over in Cerritos, which had been built twenty years ago and was ugly. I liked that about it. It was like a relative nobody liked but everybody still had to be related to anyway. We went to the kids’ store and she bought me two shirts, one orange, one red, and then I got very attached to a particular cap with an octopus on the cap part, and I felt if I left it in the store I might dissolve. I didn’t have much allowance left due to the spenditure of the lobster soup, and so I asked my mom as nicely as I could if I could have an advance and get the octopus cap because I loved it very much.
That? She was holding the store bag and trying to stop the salesperson from talking to her by staring out the door. Thanks, she was saying, thanks, thanks.
I love it, I said, putting it on my head. It was too big. I couldn’t see well underneath it.
Please? I said.
We just got you two new shirts, she said. Do you really need a cap?
It’s good for skin cancer, I said. Of the face.
She laughed. She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her job trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad’s job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn’t think of how. That afternoon, I didn’t want to bother her more, but I wasn’t certain I could leave the store with that cap still in it. If someone else bought it, I might tear in two.
I will pay you back, I said. I swear. Or we can exchange it for one of the shirts?
She got me the cap because I hardly ever asked for much, and at home I slept with it on, and wore my new orange shirt to school and back, and I was ready to charge ahead into my afternoon activities when I noticed the octopus cap on my dresser.
I thought it was the one on my head, except then I realized that that one was already on my head. So this had to be a new one? I took the one on my head off and held them both side by side. Two octopus caps. I had two now. One, two. They were both exactly the same, but I kept saying right hand, right hand, in my head, so I’d remember which one I’d bought, because that was the one I wanted. I didn’t want another octopus cap. It was about this particular right-hand octopus cap; that was the one I had fallen in love with. Somehow, it made me feel so sad, to have two. So sad I thought I couldn’t stand it.
I took the new one, left hand, to the trash, but then I thought my mom might see it and get mad that I’d thrown out the new cap she had especially bought for me, so I put the one I loved on my head and put the one I hated in the closet, behind several old sweatshirts. I went out to play wearing the first one. I played kickball with Dot Meyers next door, but she kicks cock-eyed and it was hard to see out of the cap, and when I went inside I scrounged in the closet for the second cap and it fit. That’s what was so sad. It was the right size, and I put it on, and it was better. I put them both on, one after the other, because at least by size now I could tell which was which, but it was just plain true that the one I loved did not fit and kept falling off and the one they brought did fit and looked better. Dot Meyers thought I looked dumb in a bad-fitting cap, but she’s dumb anyway and can’t spell America right.
I saw Hannah kissing a boy I’d never seen before, outside our house, in the bushes.
That night, I put a bunch of stuff in Hannah’s bedroom to freak her out, but she immediately recognized it all as mine, so it just wasn’t the same.
I wore the good new cap to school.
I ate the lobster soup. I liked it. It had a neat texture. I liked it better than the usual plebeian chicken noodle my mom got. I liked the remaining wild rice one that hadn’t made it into the Halloween bag; it was so hearty and different. I used the cow cup I’d salvaged from the trash, and the truth was, I liked the cow holding a balloon; it was cute. When I looked in the mirror, I sneered my upper lip and said, Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, your head is on the block.
Mom came home from taking a class called Learning How to Focus Your Mind, and she seemed kind of focused, more than usual at least, and she sat with Grandma on the sofa and talked about childhood.
After a while I sat with them. There’s nothing to do after homework and TV and creaming Dot Meyers.
You were a quiet child, said Grandma.
What did I like to do? asked Mom.
You liked to go with me to the store, said Grandma.
What else? asked Mom.
You liked to stir the batter, said Grandma.
What else?
I don’t know, said Grandma. You liked to read.
Even as they were talking, I saw it happen on the dining room table. Saw it as they were talking, but it wasn’t like an invisible hand. Just one second there was a blank table, and I blinked, and then there was a gift on the table, a red-wrapped gift with a yellow bow. It was in a box, and I went to it and sat at the table. I knew it was for me. I didn’t need to tell them, plus they were talking a lot, plus Dad was at work, plus Hannah was out kissing.
It had no card, but it was really good wrapping, with those clean-cut triangular corners, and I opened it up and inside was a toy I had broken long ago. Actually, I hadn’t broken it; Hannah had. It was a mouse, made of glass, and Hannah had borrowed it without asking and dropped it in the toilet by accident—so she said—and broken off the red ball nose. I had been so mad at her I hadn’t spoken to her for a week and I’d made a rule that she couldn’t come in my room ever again and I asked Mom for a door lock, but she didn’t think I really meant it so I got one myself, at the hardware store, with a key, with money from my birthday, but I couldn’t figure out how to put it on. Here was the mouse, with its nose.