Owning It Read online

  I dry off, slip into my onesie jammies with the bunny ears and cottony tail, and put my hair in braids, wrapping them around the top of my head Heidi-style.

  I haven’t eaten much since the crash—too stressed about everything—and now I realize I am caveman hungry. My stomach is making angry burbling sounds. All I can think about is my mom’s veggie white lasagna and a glass of Chardonnay. Gaudí in Heaven! I loooove my mom’s white lasagna. Spinach, eggplant, carrots, garlic, onions, and broccoli layered between sheets of homemade whole-grain pasta and smothered in provolone, mozzarella, Asiago, and Parmesan.

  A primeval growl rumbles around in my tummy. If I don’t eat something soon, I might start gnawing on Dalí’s leg. Dalí is our schnauzer. He has these wild, bug eyes and a black mustache that make him look like a canine version of Salvador Dalí. He’s the best dog ever.

  I am halfway down the stairs, Dalí hot on my heels, when I hear clinking glasses and low murmuring. It’s eleven-thirty on a Wednesday. My parents should be at work.

  They must have left the television on.

  I hop off the last step, which makes Dalí yap excitedly. He hops off the last step, too. Told you he was the best dog ever. Together, we hop like bunnies into the living room.

  I stop hopping when I realize the murmuring isn’t coming from the flat screen. The living room is wall-to-wall eggheads, academics and professors from the university.

  Professor Snape takes one look at me in my bunny onesie and spills his drink on his lap. His name isn’t really Snape. It’s Snapp. Edward T. Snapp the third. But he has black hair and an even darker aura, so I call him Snape.

  “I am terribly sorry, Elisabet,” Snape intones.

  Snape looks so forlorn.

  I feel sorry for him, so I fling my arms around him and say, “There’s no use crying over spilled merlot.”

  He stays stiff as a board, his arms at his sides, his back as ramrod straight as Harry Potter’s broom, so I squeeze him a little tighter. Snape pulls away, and I can see that his aura has shifted from black to gray.

  Aw! He’s sad!

  Using the sleeve of my onesie, I dab at the violent purple stain on the front of his shirt while singing the refrain of “Don’t Cry, Baby.” I am singing it in a smoky, throaty way reminiscent of Madeleine Peyroux’s jazzy rendition, rather than Etta James’s upbeat, bluesy version. Etta could wail, but this situation calls for a restrained, mournful ballad, don’t you think?

  “Delaney!” my mother says, stepping between me and Snape. “What is the matter with you? Go to the kitchen and get a washcloth.”

  “That really isn’t necessary,” Dr. Ingegerd, chair of the university’s Women and Gender Studies Department, interjects in her gravelly voice. “Professor Snapp is as capable of getting a washcloth as Delaney, unless you believe the kitchen is only a woman’s domain?”

  “I love you, Dr. Ingegerd.” I say, throwing my arms around the tall Swedish professor. “You get me, don’t you? I mean, you really get my struggle.”

  My mother grabs my arm and pulls me toward the stairs. I blow kisses to the other professors just so they don’t feel emotionally shortchanged and follow my mother up the stairs. She leads me into my room and closes the door behind us.

  “What is the matter with you, Laney?”

  My mom’s voice sounds angry, but the frown lines and furrowed brow tell me she is worried.

  “I love you, Mom,” I say, putting my arms around her and pulling her close. “To the farthest galaxy and back again. Like way, way beyond what the Hubble Telescope can see.”

  She hugs me tight, then pulls out of my embrace to stare into my eyes. She tilts her head and narrows her gaze.

  “You seem to love everyone today . . . even Professor Snapp.”

  “Poor Professor Snape!” I walk over to my bed and fall straight back with my arms out, like I am doing the Nestea Plunge. “He projects this frigid, intimidating air, but I think it’s just his way of keeping others at arm’s distance. I’ll bet he is afraid of rejection.”

  “Hmm,” Mom says, coming over to sit on the edge of my bed. “That’s rather perceptive.”

  “I am a super perceptive bunny,” I say, twitching my nose.

  “Delaney Brooks, have you been smoking the ganja?”

  “Weed.” I giggle. “Nobody calls it ganja anymore, Mom. Well, maybe some people still call it ganja.”

  I start giggling and can’t stop. Soon I am rolling around on my bed, holding my tummy, and gasping for breath.

  Mom gets up and walks out of my room, closing the door with a deceptively silent click, and just like that, I don’t feel like giggling anymore.

  Chapter 4

  Laney’s Life Playlist

  “Stressed Out” by Twenty One Pilots

  “Starfish and Coffee” by Prince

  “Swallow My Pride” by The Ramones

  It’s seven forty-five in the morning, and I am facedown on my bed, legs and arms hanging off the sides, like some sad little starfish clinging to the beach. Dalí is crashed out beside me, head on my pillow, whiskers trembling with each snuffled exhalation. The scent of maple syrup, fresh brewed coffee, and frying Tofurky bacon snakes up the stairs and through the crack beneath my door, and tickles my nose like a hiss. I am Donner Party hungry, ready to gnaw on Dalí’s furry gray paw, but too ashamed by my behavior yesterday to make the journey from my room to the promised land of pancakes.

  I’ve done many things to embarrass my parents—failing second grade, majoring in art and music appreciation, protesting the censorship of street artists by roller-skating through campus wearing only body paint and a piece of duct tape across my mouth, dressing like a unicorn—but snuggling up to Professor Snape while wearing a fuzzy bunny onesie has got to be at the top of the list. I feel like crying just remembering my mom’s shocked expression and the feel of Snape’s cold, waxen, strangely scentless cheek beneath my lips.

  I hear someone coming up the stairs and the shrill creek of the floorboard outside my bedroom door, so I grab a pillow and put it over my head. Maybe I can score a reprieve from the parental verbal guillotine dangling over my neck by feigning sleep.

  “Laney,” my father says, opening the door, “please come downstairs. We would like to have a word with you.”

  I let my starfish limbs dangle off the sides of my bed, while opening my mouth a little and making a soft gurgling noise in the back of my throat. It’s an Oscar-worthy performance. Don’t laugh. If Anne Hathaway could win a statuette for playing a corpse in Les Mis-érables, I’ll bet I can convince my skeptical father than I am living in the Land of Nod.

  “Laney?”

  I am not ready to abandon my quest for the Oscar gold. I smack my lips together and turn my head so the pillow tumbles to the floor, shifting positions just enough to make my parental audience believe my slumber has been ever so gently disturbed, but not broken. Cue mournful music, strangled gasps, and death rattle. Fantine is about to take her last breath. Soon, she will clutch the statuette in her bony hand and thank all the little people who made her performance possible.

  “You’re not fooling me, Laney,” my father says, his deep voice rumbling around my room like a pre-Oscar winner announcement drumroll. Dalí hops up and starts licking my face. “You’re not fooling the dog, either.”

  Adieu, Monsieur Oscar. C’est la vie. Who wants to spend a night in Spanx and Harry Winston jewels, schmoozing with Ryan Seacrest and Giuliana Rancic anyway? Anne can keep her Academy Award.

  I sit up, yawn, and pretend to wipe sleep from my eyes.

  “ ‘Good morning, said Bilbo, and he meant it,’ ” I say, smiling sheepishly at my father.

  When I was six, my dad read me J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Since then, we’ve made it our morning ritual to recite a scene wherein Bilbo greets Gandalf with a sincere “Good Morning.” Pops should respond with the next lines in the book. But he doesn’t.

  He simply stares at me, his cardigan-clad arms crossed over his chest, his lips t
urned down, worry lines etched across his forehead.

  “I am sorry, Pops,” I say, climbing wearily out of bed, shuffling over to him, and giving him a hug. “Please forgive me.”

  Dad wraps his arms around me, and I rest my head on his shoulder. Dad hugs are the best; they’re as warm and comforting as cashmere jammies and smell like nutmeg, leather, and smoky wood. They can almost make you forget that you are dwelling in the negative space; that you’re a single, unemployed, homeless, unicorn with a Depression-era bank account and a devo Mini Cooper.

  Almost.

  “Mom’s making her carrot whole-wheat pancakes,” he says, breaking our hug. Dad can only do feely situations in short bursts. “Why don’t you run a comb through your hair and join us in the kitchen? We would like to discuss a few things with you.”

  He leaves before I can respond. Dalí bounds after him.

  Traitor in a fur suit.

  I pad over to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and groan. My hair looks cray-cray, a dark brown hair hive that’s probably become home to a few honeybees. (Pops raises bees, is a proud member of the Xerxes Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and is passionate about protecting the pollinators, so it’s a very real possibility that my do has become a condo for flying creatures.)

  I shift my gaze from my hair hive to the unbelievable unibrow spanning the length of my forehead. In my poverty and depression, I have seriously shirked my brow-maintenance responsibilities.

  I grab my brush and attempt to yank it through my snarled hair.

  I strip out of my bunny onesie and hop in the shower. Five minutes and half a bottle of Elava Botanik Papaya Conditioner later (it leaves my hair as silky as a Pantene model’s hair and is safe for the environment), I am ready for pancakes and the parental verbal guillotine. One must not have split ends when meeting the executioner.

  I step into my clean cat onesie and zip it up, before hurrying down the stairs, my damp, environmentally friendly hair still wrapped in a towel. My parents are already sitting at the kitchen table, gazing somberly over steaming cups of coffee. The look my mom gives me when I walk into the kitchen in my cat onesie lets me know I am in one maple-syrup-sticky situation with her. I decide a preemptive apology is the only way to extricate myself.

  “Mom,” I say, sliding onto the chair across from her, “I know my behavior yesterday was uggo. Like, way uglier than those planks who think global warming is just a noisy political battle and not a life-threatening reality.”

  Mom believed in climate change before Leonardo DiCaprio frolicked with orangutans in an Indonesian ecosystem and John Kerry gave toothy, dire interviews about global warming to Rolling Stone reporters. I share her belief, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t throw out the climate change analogy to help get me out of this hot-maple-syrup situation.

  “Planks?” she frowns.

  “Flat, wooden, and lacking depth.”

  Laney-speak, as she calls it, usually makes my mom chuckle, but today she doesn’t even smile. Not a lip twitch or a grin. So I drop the pandering analogies and get real.

  “I know you have worked hard to build a respectable reputation in academia.” Even though I am feeling what I am saying, deeply, my voice quavers and lacks the conviction I need her to hear. “I know I am not the sort of daughter a distinguished, brilliant professor wants to claim as her own. I am an embarrassment, with my ADD, my dreaminess, my ridiculously dramatic wardrobe. I know that.”

  I can’t look at her. I am too ashamed. I look down at my hands and pretend to pick dried paint from my fingernails. Several painful breaths later, I finish what I need to say, what I need her to hear.

  “I am sorry, Mom, for everything I have ever done to humiliate you, but especially for yesterday, for humiliating you in front of people you admire.”

  A heart-twisting, breath-stealing silence stretches between us, each painful second punctuated by the loud tick-tick-tick of the wall clock. When I finally look up, into my mom’s eyes, I see they’re filled with glassy tears, not flinty anger. She just stares at me, her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. I want her to say something . . . anything.

  My dad clears his throat. He is the next to speak, not mom.

  “What happened yesterday, Laney?”

  I consider telling them that I’ve been nurturing a secret crush on Professor Snape for years now, that I jones for his broody personality and natty tweed coat collection, because the truth is humiliating.

  “Laney?”

  I look from Mom’s teary eyes to my dad’s raised brows and realize I am just going to have to own it. “I’m sorry, Pops. The painkillers made me loopier than Toucan Sam.”

  My dad stares at me.

  “Toucan Sam,” I say, grabbing a pancake, tearing it in half, and popping it into my mouth. “The cartoon bird on the Froot Loops commercials?”

  “I know who Toucan Sam is, Delaney Lavender Brooks.”

  Uh-oh. This is bad, like epic bad. Pops has only used my full name maybe a dozen times in twenty-five years. Some kids hate their middle names. Not me. Lavender is hippy-dippy cool. My mom picked it because she says I was conceived while her and Pops were staying at a lavender farm in the south of France and because my eyes are kinda bluish-purple. I would love to stay on a lavender farm, wake every morning with the powdery floral scent . . .

  “Laney?” Dad raises his hand and snaps his fingers to get my attention. “Away chasing unicorns again?”

  I grin. “Guilty as Gollum.”

  Pops closes his eyes and shakes his head slowly. This is the second time I have referenced Tolkien this morning, and all I am getting is . . . crickets. Tough audience. It doesn’t look like I am going to be able to soft-shoe or joke my way out of this one.

  “I am sorry for embarrassing you, Mom,” I say, but Mom won’t meet my gaze. “I will apologize to Professor Snape and Dr. Ingergerd today.”

  Pops opens his eyes wide, his mouth opens and closes like the butterfly carp in our koi pond. Open. Closed. Open.

  “I don’t think your mother cares about Professor Snape . . . err, Snapp,” he says, reaching out to cover my mom’s hand with his own. “I think she is concerned about you. In the last few days, you have been evicted from your apartment, crashed your car, and gotten high on painkillers.”

  “I wasn’t high—”

  Pops frowns, and I have a sudden flashback of Professor Snape’s pained grimace when I asked him if he wanted to give my bunny tail a little squeeze. “Okay, so the pills might have made me just the tiniest bit loopy. I am talking smaller than an atom, like a pentaquirk or a—”

  “Quark.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s pentaquark, Laney”

  “Sorry.” I drop the other half of the pancake onto my plate and push it away, resting my elbow on the table and my chin on my elbow. “You’re the physics professor. I’m just the unemployed, dyslexic disappointment destined to become a pill-popping jerry hanging around the res at Valmont.”

  My mom winces, and I regret my reference to the most drug-infested area in all of Boulder. It’s where college kids go to score pills so they can pull all-nighters, addicts get whacked out on heroin, and some sad soul drowned after he smoked meth and tried to walk across the reservoir like Jesus at the Sea of Galilee.

  “In light of your recent behavior, do you think making jokes about drug use is appropriate?”

  “No,” I say, tears filling my eyes. “Probably not.”

  “Is there something you want to tell us?” He reaches across the table and tilts my chin so I am forced to look into his yes. “Anything at all?”

  “I’m not a drug addict, if that’s what you’re asking!”

  “So you weren’t high when you crashed your car?”

  “What?” I leap out of my chair, pace the length of the kitchen a few times, and then sit back down. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  My parents clasp hands and stare at me.

  “Wow! You are serious.”

 
“Totes,” my mom whispers.

  “So, what? This is, like, an intervention?”

  “I don’t know,” Pops whispers. “Is it?”

  “No!” I shake my head so hard my towel comes undone and falls onto my lap. “No, no, no! I have never done drugs, not heroin or meth or cocaine. Apart from the painkillers I took yesterday when my head felt like it was going to explode off of my neck, the only pills I have ever ‘popped’ were antibiotics that time I had bronchitis and . . .”

  “And?” Mom prompts.

  “Birth control.”

  Pops clears his throat. He looks even more uncomfortable than he did when we were talking about me being an addict. He stares into his coffee mug. Mom stares into her coffee mug.

  I can’t even right now.

  For weeks, my life has been circling the rim of the toilet bowl. This morning, it finally splashed down into the commode. I am back-floating in shit. That’s what it feels like, anyway, to have my parents ask if I am an addict. Mega craptastic. And what’s worse? I don’t blame them for wondering if the cause of my spectacularly unsuccessful life is chemical dependency.

  “Look,” I say, my voice quavering. “I get it. I know how this all looks. I am a twenty-five-year-old who wears mismatched socks and an old-fashioned Minnie Mouse watch. I earn my bread money by dressing like a mythical creature and singing ridiculous songs to toddlers. I don’t have a retirement account, renter’s insurance, or a plunger.”

  Pops frowns.

  “Adults have toilet plungers!” I cry. “They don’t use a fireplace bellows or a vegetable scrubber to unclog their toilets, because they’re responsible enough to remember to buy a plunger.”

  I use the sleeve of my onesie to wipe the tears from my cheeks.

  “There’s a simple solution to your plunger problem, Lane,” my practical Pops says. “Just make a note to buy a toilet plunger the next time you go to the grocery store.”

  “I did!” I sniffle. “But I got distracted in the candy aisle. Half an hour later, I’ve got a cart full of chocolate. I felt guilty about the candy, so I went to the produce aisle for fresh veggies. And when I was there, I saw the cutest vegetable scrub brush shaped like a walrus. Before I knew it, I was back home eating Brookside Clusters and scrubbing potatoes.”