Between the Notes Read online

  I walked toward the porch steps but couldn’t bring myself to go any farther. It was my mother’s face that stopped me. For the thinnest whisper of a moment, her brave smile had slipped, and I caught her reaction. The same panic and dread that clenched my stomach were reflected back to me in her eyes.

  She was as scared as I was.

  “Coming in?” Mom held the screen door open, her everything-will-be-just-fine mask back in place.

  “Sure,” I said. “In a sec.”

  I waited for her to disappear inside before attempting my escape but only made it as far as the edge of our yard, all of ten paces away. I stood there, looking around. The neighborhood didn’t appear to be laid out in any sort of grid. Houses were scattered at random angles, as if they’d sauntered up the hill, spied an empty lot, and plopped down. A gravel road meandered between them. Our house was the only one taller than two stories, dwarfing the squat little houses and cabins around it. Bungalows? I wasn’t sure what to call them.

  Some kids on bicycles came tearing around the corner, skidding on the gravel road. They headed for the playground across from our house, bumping over the grass and dirt and hopping off their bikes to make a pass across the monkey bars. They noticed me standing there, and one of the little girls stared for a minute, then said something I couldn’t hear to the others and they all leaped back on their bikes and rode away.

  I vaguely registered the creak of door hinges behind me and expected to hear my parents calling me inside. But they didn’t. Nobody was there when I turned. I looked toward the neighboring house, a small brick ranch surrounded by a tall hedge. Nobody there, either, but I noticed for the first time an older-model Jeep parked out front. It was bright red and immaculately clean, the only vehicle I’d seen so far that wasn’t covered in a film of dust from the gravel road.

  I was staring at the Jeep, thinking it didn’t belong here any more than I did, when its engine revved. Jumping back, I fell against the rear bumper of our car. The Jeep lurched forward and rumbled my way. I regained my balance and stood there like I’d never seen an automobile before as it covered the short distance between us and rolled to a stop in front of me.

  A tattooed arm, lean but muscled, stuck out the window. It looked familiar, and when I lifted my gaze to the driver’s face, I knew where I’d seen it before. Or, rather, where I’d ignored it before.

  The tattoo—an intricate pattern of chains and gears—belonged to none other than Lennie Lazarski, a senior at Vanderbilt High School and its most notorious druggie.

  His black hair, always tied in a short ponytail at school, hung wet and loose around his face like he’d just showered. He drummed his fingers on the outside of the Jeep’s door, flexing his tattoo as he looked me up and down. Then the corner of his lips curled into a lopsided grin.

  “Ivy. Emerson.” He punctuated my name like that, slowly, in two parts.

  I didn’t think it necessary to acknowledge that I was, indeed, Ivy Emerson. Or that I knew who he was. Not that I could’ve spoken if I’d wanted to. My mouth was suddenly very dry, and my throat . . . my throat was doing its squeezed-tight thing. I stared at him, blinking. Hoping he’d disappear.

  Lazarski’s eyes darted from me to our car to the brown house and back to me. He let out a single, raspy snort of laughter, then gunned the Jeep’s engine again and drove off, stirring up a cloud of dust that billowed at my feet.

  TWO

  “Thou hast thine period?” Reesa said in a British accent. She was trying to guess the source of my agony as we sat in her bedroom after school on Friday.

  Moan.

  “Thy mother hath readeth thine diary?”

  Reesa had been talking like this since we started studying Chaucer in AP English the week before. I shook my head, moaned some more. I didn’t keep a diary, exactly. It was more of a journal, where I scribbled bits of poetry and song lyrics and occasional rants I couldn’t rant about in front of Brady.

  “They didn’t have the dress thine wantedeth in a size zero?”

  Already I felt the wedge, a little sliver of a thing at first, start to wiggle its way between us. In Reesa’s world, the one I’d lived in until last week’s big foreclosure reveal, the worst imaginable causes for distress were things like cramps. And a dearth of cute dresses.

  “Not even close,” I said.

  She plopped down next to me. “I giveth up.”

  I took a deep breath. “You need to swear you won’t tell anyone or laugh or stop being my friend. And you need to promise you will lie, if necessary, to protect me.”

  “Oh, my God, yes, yes, yes,” she said. “Tell me. What is going on?”

  I lifted a stuffed koala bear from her bed and pressed it to my face, peering over its fluffy head to gauge her reaction as I spoke the horrible words. “We’re moving. To Lakeside.”

  Her eyes got big. “Uhhh . . . what?”

  “We’re moving.”

  “Yeah, I got that part, which is just . . . wrong. But I could swear you said you’re moving to Lakeside. And that’s insane.”

  “We’re moving into an apartment over there. In a house. It’s behind a long-term storage place off Jackson Boulevard, you know?”

  Reesa did not know. Her blank stare got blanker.

  “There’s a Save-a-Buck store at the corner. Or Save-a-Cent. Whatever it’s called. It’s . . . it’s over there.” I waved feebly in the general direction of my new neighborhood.

  “B-but, why?” She could not have looked more shocked and disgusted if I’d announced I was pursuing a career as a pole dancer.

  “My parents are totally broke. The bank is foreclosing on our house. We’re . . .” I lowered my voice. “We’re poor.”

  “That’s not possible. How is that possible?”

  I tried to explain what my parents had told me, how my father had put our house up as collateral on a business loan right before the economy tanked. It hadn’t seemed like much of a risk at the time because sales had tripled the year before. Then everything bottomed out, and Brady started having all kinds of therapy. My mom had to stop working to take care of Brady, and they couldn’t keep up.

  “It came down to paying our mortgage or paying for Brady’s therapy,” I said. “And they couldn’t exactly stop teaching him how to talk and stuff.”

  Reesa squeezed her cheeks between her hands, nodding. She knew. Outside our immediate family, she was one of the few people who knew the challenges Brady faced, how hard everything was for him. She watched him take his first steps, applauding along with the rest of us. She helped me teach him how to clap. He still claps whenever he sees her.

  “Couldn’t they, like, declare bankruptcy or something? That’s what my uncle did and he didn’t have to give up his house or his boat or anything,” said Reesa.

  “I don’t think it’s an option.” Or, at least, not one my father was willing to consider. I had overheard my parents arguing about it months ago, one of many signs of our impending doom that I’d ignored. When I walked in and asked what was wrong, they said everything was fine. Nothing for you to worry about, sweetie.

  Maybe they’d thought they could fix it, that something would come up. But it hadn’t. They’d put off the inevitable as long as they could. “Dad said we just have to live within our means. Make it work.”

  “Like Project Runway.”

  “I wish.” I flopped back on the bed. “Try ‘Project Poverty.’”

  Reesa crinkled her nose as if she’d just taken a whiff of the girls’ locker room at school. I had thought it would make me feel better to tell Reesa, to hear her say everything would be all right, that it wasn’t so bad, that nobody would even notice or care. But she didn’t say any of those things.

  She said, “That sucketh.”

  I hadn’t even described the house yet—its overwhelming brown-ness, my closet-sized bedroom. “It’s not that bad,” I lied, suddenly afraid of scaring her off entirely. “Kind of cozy, actually.”

  Reesa pouted. “I’ll never see you. You�
��ll be too busy smoking pot. And getting tattoos.”

  I rolled my eyes. “No, I won’t.” I had already decided not to mention Lennie Lazarski. Even a friend as loyal as Reesa might run screaming if I mentioned that he lived next door.

  “Move over.” She put her head next to mine on the pillow and we both stared at the ceiling. There were still a few of the glow-in-the-dark stars we’d stuck up there in the shape of constellations when we were twelve. “I can’t believe you’re leaving me.”

  “I’ll see you at school every day, and I’ll get Mom to drive me over here on weekends, and you can . . .” I almost suggested she visit me, but I didn’t want to trigger that smelly-locker-room sneer again.

  “I’ll call you,” she said. “All the time.”

  I pulled my phone out, dialed her number, and showed her the NO SERVICE message that popped up on the screen. “I’m officially a total loser. Just, please . . . don’t tell anyone. Okay?”

  “Someone might notice if you never answer your phone again.”

  “I’ll make up some excuse. Nobody has to know I moved. Nobody.”

  Reesa nodded, knowing exactly who I was talking about: Willow Goodwin and Wynn Davies, a.k.a. Wicked and Witch. We ate lunch with them every day, went shopping together, attended the same parties. They were among our closest friends.

  And we couldn’t stand them half the time.

  Willow’s mother was “old money” and her dad worked as an attorney, not that he had to work at all. The only reason my dad works is so he doesn’t have to hang out with my mom all day, Willow told us. She insisted that she hated her mother, but she didn’t mind the perks that came with being Frances Goodwin’s daughter, like getting the role of Clara in The Nutcracker after her mother donated a million dollars to the Belleview Ballet.

  Wynn was spoiled, too, but more so by the absence of her parents. They took their role as socialites seriously, and that meant Wynn was practically raised by a revolving door of nannies du jour. Her parents bought her whatever she wanted to keep her happy.

  The two of them sat at the tippy top of the social ladder of Vanderbilt High School and made it their business to know everything about everybody.

  “They’ll find out,” said Reesa. “They always do.”

  My throat tightened. I knew girls fed gossip to Willow and Wynn, simply to avoid being targeted themselves—a preemptive strike of sorts.

  “Can’t your parents borrow money from someone?” Reesa reached for the Tiffany-blue, polka-dotted piggy bank on her nightstand, as if its contents would make a difference.

  I shook my head.

  “My parents are packing up the last of our stuff right now, so we can move this weekend,” I said. The bank wasn’t officially foreclosing on the house for another month, but it would take a few weeks to sell all the furniture we weren’t taking with us.

  “This weekend?” Reesa sucked in a sharp breath. “As in tomorrow?”

  I closed my eyes. “Yeah.”

  “This is bad.”

  Duh.

  “But it’s not, like, permanent, is it?” Reesa was going through the same five stages of Oh-Shit-This-Can’t-Be-Happening that I had: denial, denial, denial, denial, and denial.

  I could only shrug. My father had assured me the apartment was a temporary fix. We’d find a regular house in Westside Falls once the debts were paid and some of our savings replenished. But he wouldn’t say if “temporary” meant a few weeks or a few months. I didn’t want to consider that it might be even longer.

  THREE

  Saturday morning I rode shotgun in the truck Daddy rented to haul our stuff. Mom was planning to follow in the car with the twins and Brady’s little fish tank once she packed up the food from our fridge. I hadn’t showered. My hair was knotted into the same messy bun I’d slept in, and my sweatshirt had toothpaste down the front. Not that it mattered. Nobody important would see me today.

  “The red couch from the den will go in the living room,” said Dad, seemingly oblivious to my unenthusiasm. “Your mother’s little writing desk will fit in your room. That small dresser of Kaya’s will be yours, too. . . .”

  I zoned out on his detailed inventory of what we’d brought from our old house. My piano hadn’t made the cut, of course. None of my bedroom furniture had, either. All of it was too big to fit in the tiny attic room that would be mine.

  “. . . and Carla asked one of the neighbor boys to put together a moving crew to help us unload, so it shouldn’t take long.”

  “Who?” I said, panic rising in my throat.

  “Carla Rodriguez. Our landlady. She’s very nice. Your mother’s already spoken to her about watching Brady and Kaya from time to time. I think you’ll like her. She’s—”

  “No, what neighbor boy?”

  “Hmm?” He bent over the steering wheel to see out my side-view mirror. “I think I just cut that guy off. Sorry!” He waggled his hand toward my window. “Give him a wave, so he doesn’t think we’re jerks.”

  I leaned out the window and offered what I hoped was a we’re-not-jerks sort of wave. In the side mirror, I saw an arm shoot out of the passenger side, wave, then give me the finger.

  “I’m pretty sure he still thinks we’re jerks,” I mumbled. I rolled up my window and ducked down in my seat.

  The car continued to follow us into our new neighborhood, stopping in front of the Lazarskis’ house as we pulled in front of ours.

  “Uh, Dad? I think the guy we cut off is part of our moving crew . . . or he wants to kill us,” I said. I slid down in my seat even more.

  “Oh, great. I can apologize in person.” Dad jumped out and strode over to their car. The whole embarrassing scene was visible in the driver’s side-view mirror.

  “Sorry ’bout that, boys,” Dad said, sounding like one of those annoyingly reasonable and cheerful fathers on a 1960s sitcom. “It’s harder to drive that thing than I thought.” He gestured toward the truck and I ducked down farther—I was practically on the floor at this point—so they wouldn’t spot me.

  There was some muttering among them that I couldn’t make out, and the squeak of a screen door. Someone shouted, “Lazo, my man!” A voice that I presumed was Lazo’s said, “Gentlemen.” And the decidedly-not-gentlemen laughed.

  More muttering. Then Dad was back, opening the door to the truck. “Are you coming? Do you want to meet the boys?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No way.”

  “Ivy, please.”

  I shook my head again and Daddy sighed, closed the truck door, and walked up to the front porch. I heard a woman’s voice, and the door to the house closed.

  Then laughing. Hooting. “‘Sorry, boys,’” someone mimicked my dad’s deep voice. More laughing. Then, “Shut it, dickwad,” “I need a smoke,” and “Are we gettin’ paid to carry that asshole’s furniture, or what?”

  I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up and pressed it to my ears. When Daddy came back to the truck, I would tell him to make them go away. I’d rather carry every single box up three flights of stairs myself than let any one of them step foot in our apartment.

  Suddenly, the passenger door I was leaning against was yanked open, and I nearly rolled out backward.

  “Shit, Emerson.” Lennie Lazarski caught my shoulders from behind and shoved me back in. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  A kid with a scar under his lip stood behind him laughing.

  “Nice language,” I said, scrambling onto the seat.

  “Yeah, nice language, Leonard,” said Scar Face. “Is that any way to talk to such a fine piece of Westside ass?”

  Lazarski smirked. “She’s not a Westsider anymore, is she?”

  I wanted to shout that I was not a Lakesider and never would be, but I was here. In a moving truck. Waiting for my belongings to be unloaded. It was kind of hard to claim that I wasn’t one of them. I reached for the door handle instead and slammed the door closed, punching the manual lock down with my fist.

  “Go away,” I said through
the glass.

  Lazarski crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his head back so he could look down his nose at me. “You gonna carry this stuff inside all by yourself?”

  I took a deep, shuddery breath and cranked the window down a couple of inches, to make sure he could hear me. “Yes, we are. Your services are no longer required, so you and your friends can go home.”

  A slow smile spread across his lips. He uncrossed his arms and did a deep, exaggerated bow, swishing his hand in the air like he was bowing to the Queen of England. “As you wish, Your Royal Highness.”

  Sauntering away, he threw an arm over Scar Face’s shoulder and called out to the guys, “Hear that, gentlemen? Our services are no longer required.”

  They all started talking over one another. “Great.” “I got out of bed for this shit?” “What’d you say to her?” “This is bullshit, man.” “Dude, I’m hungry.” “Yeah. Let’s eat.” “Vinny’s?” “Yeah, Vinny’s.”

  I lay on the truck seat with my arms wrapped around my head until I finally heard four car doors slam shut and the sound of tires spinning out on gravel.

  A few minutes later, the front door to our house swung open. I lifted my head to see Daddy step onto the porch, followed by a slender, dark-haired woman. Carla, I presumed. They looked toward the puff of gravel dust the car had left in its wake.

  “Where’d everybody go?” said Dad.

  Carla took a few steps toward Lazarski’s house. “Leonard?”

  I scrambled to the driver’s-side door and pushed it open, jumping down to the road. Lazarski was nowhere to be seen.

  Dad turned a befuddled face toward me. “What happened?”

  “Nothing, they . . .” I lifted my chin, refusing to cry. “We don’t need any help. We can do it ourselves.”