Which Jaycee? The one who’s the varsity cheerleader. Which Jaycee? The one who’s the varsity cheerleader. Which Jaycee? I say it like a mantra, thinking it over and over again as my hands reach the apex of every jumping jack. Liza from school said that things come true if you say them to yourself enough, and even though her dad’s a hippie and mom calls herself a witch, I think Liza might be right. My brother Jackson and I, back when I was eleven and he was nine, called Mom crazy behind her back and that came true. Liza also says that our parents teach us how to behave, but we need to take responsibility for ourselves, so sometimes I blame Dad and other times I don’t. But that was three years ago, when Dad didn’t have his job at the dealership, when taking care of us was his job because we were young and Mom was still working at the library. To be honest, Liza also wears stupid-looking sweaters on hot days and believes in horoscopes and puts ketchup in her spaghetti, so she might be wrong, but who cares. I’d rather be safe than sorry.
I want to be a flyer, so I don’t just need to want or wish for this: I also have to do a lot of jumping jacks. I’m already one of the smallest girls in our freshman class, which is important if I want people to throw and catch me, but I also want to accustom my body to the feeling of air, to the weightlessness, to the way it makes it hard to breath. Jackson thinks I’m too scared to be a flyer, so I spent all summer climbing to the topmost branch of the apple tree in our backyard and looking down and telling myself I felt safe so I could learn to be unafraid of heights. So far it’s working, a little. The jumping jacks are mini-practice. I have two more weeks until tryouts.
Freshman don’t always make the team, let alone varsity, but sometimes they do. Mary Patterson did last year, and Jennet Pierie the year before. A lot of special things happen to me, good and bad, so this might be my year. Uncle David says that good things come in threes, and I’ve already proven to myself I can climb to the top of the apple tree and Mom has moved out of Jackson’s room so he could move out of mine, which is another thing that’s good and bad. I hope having a room all to myself again wasn’t my last of the three. I want to save getting picked for the varsity cheerleading squad as my Third Thing.
I might be optimistic, but I’m not stupid. There’s a real chance I’ll make varsity. I’ve been doing gymnastics since I was six. No one can do more backflips in a row than me. No one has a higher spring back after a round off. When I wasn’t climbing the apple tree or doing jumping jacks this summer, I watched the varsity girls informally practice on the football field. They didn’t see me or care that I was there because a bunch of the senior boys were watching from the bleachers, passing around a couple cans of beer in crinkled bags the color of old leather, sharing a few cigarettes they stole from someone’s brother or uncle or grandma. Dumbasses, I thought. I might be fourteen, but I still know how to swear. And maybe it’s good, being fourteen and small enough to be a flyer and pre-pubescent enough to have smooth armpits without shaving, because it means I’m not so hormone-ravaged that I don’t notice things. Like the blue lights that came up above the football field when the sun went down. The cheerleaders didn’t notice them because they were too busy pretending to practice back-flips and hand-springs while they watched the boys watching them, and the boys didn’t notice the lights either because they were too busy pretending to be cool with their stolen cigarettes and warm beer while they watched the cheerleaders.
Which Jaycee? The one who’s a varsity cheerleader.
“Jay-Ceeeeee,” Jackson calls from the house. “Jay-Ceeeee… Diiiin-ner!”
I stop doing jumping jacks and look at the sky. The sun is starting to set. I figure the lights won’t come out tonight. I wipe the sweat from my forehead with my arm, tuck my T-shirt back into my jean shorts, and head to the house.
“You won’t make the team,” he says when I come through the backdoor. I let the screen snap behind me the way Dad doesn’t like. I listen for a goddamnit thunder from the living room, but it doesn’t come.
“You won’t pass sixth grade,” I counter.
“I’m going into seventh grade, loser.” He’s wearing his baseball cap backwards. There are grass-stains on his knees. Dad would whollup the back of his head if he heard Jackson call me a loser, so I figure Dad’s firmly out of earshot, screen slamming or no.
“Oh. I guess I forgot on account of you being such a ba-yyy-bee,” I let the last word whine long like the buzz of a mosquito. Jackson swings and I pin his arm behind his back. I’m still a head taller, but he’s growing, fast. I kiss him roughly on the cheek while he squirms. “Little baby Jackson,” I sing, but softly, not mockingly. Not too much. If good things come in threes, bad things come in sixes, and I don’t want Jackson to go the way of Mom. I pick him up a few inches and kiss him again. He rubs it off when I release him.
“Dad’s microwaved TV dinners. Want to take yours out front with me, Chickenbutt?”
“Sure,” I tell him. Jackson slides two plastic meal trays off the counter. With the film removed, they’re steaming. I open the fridge and lean in.
“Can of coke for you, Poopface?”
* * *
Mom stopped cooking or even having dinner with us months before she left, but the last night she was home she came down the stairs around noon, drove to the grocery store, and bought yellow potatoes, garlic, a whole chicken, two lemons, Granny Smith apples, a new bag of flour, brown sugar, a new box of salt, cinnamon, butter, whole milk, whipping cream, parsley, green beans, carrots, a head of celery, French bread, and a whole red onion.
She stuffed garlic and butter and lemon slices under the chicken’s skin and filled the carcass with onion, carrots, and celery. She went outside and picked rosemary from the bush in the front yard well above where the neighbor’s dog sometimes comes to pee and mixed it with butter and oil in a small bowl and rubbed it along the outside of the bird. She cut the potatoes into quarters and boiled them, then mashed them with whipping cream and butter and salt and parsley. She cooked the green beans, drizzled them with oil, caramelized the other half of the onion, and poured that on top, too. She carefully opened the new bag of flour over the sink and chirped, “Don’t want to spill!” at the direction of my body in the doorway.
I thought about calling Dad and telling him to come home from work at dealership, then. I thought about running as fast as I could to Jackson’s Little League practice and making him run home with me, just so he could confirm what I was seeing. Mom made an apple pie with Crisco from the back of the cabinet. She unspooled the green apples, one by one with a paring knife, from their thick skin. Liza says you always need to wash store-bought apples since they have wax on the outside, but I didn’t say anything as Mom unrolled the peels from the tart flesh and straight into her mouth. I didn’t want to stop her like you don’t want to wake someone who’s sleepwalking.
Dad picked Jackson up from practice like he was supposed to, so they got home when they were supposed to. There were candles burning on the table and placemats with thin green trim and cold whole milk sweating in glasses. Mom put the chicken and the green beans and French bread and mashed potatoes down the spine of the dining room table. The pie, I knew, was still in the oven on warm.
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” Dad asked, his voice sounding like it wasn’t a really a pleasure at all and like it was something impending rather than earned. I might be fourteen, but I can tell when someone is bullshitting.
Jackson didn’t care the same way Dad did. He just hugged Mom around the middle like Christmas came early, put his glove and bat away in my room where he’d started keeping all his stuff after Mom moved out of my parents’ bedroom, washed his hands, and thundered down the stairs still in his practice jersey.
It wasn’t until halfway through the meal that Dad noticed Mom wasn’t eating. I was watching her the whole time, so I knew. If something seems too good to be true, Dad used to tell Jackson and I when we were kids and felt bad that the neighbor kids had moms who packed them lunch and showed up on Open House nights at school and volunteered for bake sales, it probably is.
“Aren’t you hungry, Plum Sugar?” Plum Sugar was Dad’s nickname for Mom, but it was also her nickname for me. When I was little and Dad called Mom Sugar Plum I’d always mix it up, and, in my garbled baby-voice, say Pwum-Shhuga. So she started calling me Plum Sugar and Dad started calling her that, too.
“No,” she said brightly, “I have a trip to make later. If I eat too much, it’ll slow me down.”
Jackson kept eating like he hadn’t heard anything and although Dad didn’t say it, I could tell he was thinking goddamnit, but in the worst way. Not the kind of goddamnit he said when Mom poured all the salt and flour from the pantry into an uneven circle in the backyard and he found her out there with a flashlight under the full moon, clicking it on and off in Morris Code to the stars, but kind of goddamnit he used when he tried to make her come inside and she shrieked, “They’re after our kids you sonofabitch, just let me talk to them!” It was the kind of goddamnit he’d say when he found all the movable kitchen appliances and landlines unplugged, tied up in garbage bags, and half-buried behind the shed, or the kind of goddamnit he used when Mom blocked out the windows with aluminum foil. It was the kind of goddamnit he shouted when the cops rolled into the driveway, red and blue echoing against the walls of our dark house, apparently called by worried neighbors when the screaming didn’t settle after twenty minutes, an hour, two. The longer they knew us, the longer the neighbors learned to wait, but just like the radio eventually always gives way to static—all those Jesus-lovers on late night shows fading into garbled voices—everyone reaches a point where they can’t listen to you anymore, either by will or force. Get away far enough, even God gives up.
“Sue?” He asked slowly. “Sue, maybe you need to go upstairs and rest. You did a lot of work today. The kids and I will clean this up.”
“May I be excused?”
“Of course.”
She went upstairs, and we heard Jackson’s bedroom door close. When I asked Jackson later, he said that was the last he saw of her, leaving the table, going up the stairs. I didn’t ask twice and I didn’t ask Dad. Someone found her shoes and jacket folded on the shore the next day, her car in the parking lot with the keys placed square and neat on the dash.
* * *
Jackson thinks it was aliens. He won’t tell Dad, but after Mom went missing he went through the things she left in what was used to not be, but not was now again, his dresser. He found printed-out articles about Area 51. He found photographs—old polaroid ones—of crop circles he said looked like the pattern Mom made with salt and flour that one time, and a smooth-ish rock with scoops taken out of it that’s heavier than it looks and smells like loose change. Jackson said he asked his teacher who told him it was probably an iron-nickel alloy. He found a newspaper report from a town I didn’t know that talked about a child who claimed she was abducted by aliens then released a week later. Her parents found her in the woods behind their house.
“Did Mom even live in Nebraska?” I said, staring at the browned clipping he’d liberated from Mom’s sock drawer.
“We don’t know. That’s the point. This must be why she never talked about her parents or where she grew up.”
“She never talked about it because Grandpa was an alcoholic. And it says the girl’s name was Martha Winston.”
“She could’ve changed her name! Why would she have this if it wasn’t her? I looked up the girl—Martha Winston—and she doesn’t exist. It’s like she disappeared after graduating from high school. Mom was seven years old the year this happened, just like this girl.”
“You’re insane.”
“Look at that picture!” Jackson scream-whispered, keeping his voice low because Dad was downstairs. “She looks just like Mom!”
I squinted at the grainy snapshot. It looked like any dark-haired seven year-old. That girl could’ve been anyone’s mother, or not.
“Stupid,” I spat, before running out of his room at to the apple tree. Because I’m a head taller, I can make the first branch, but Jackson can’t and we both know it. From the top branch I could see him through the window, sitting on his bed, staring at that stupid picture. I usually don’t cry, and I didn’t after Mom left, but I did, that night. I stayed up in the apple tree until I was sure my eyes weren’t red anymore, until it was night and the light in Jackson’s bedroom had gone off.
That’s when I saw them. Three blue lights, just over the horizon. They rose and they fell. It looked like they were chasing each other. When they turned, they were iridescent, like deer-eyes when your headlights illuminate them in the dark. It looked like they were playing. They were the same ones I’d seen over the football field after Mom left. I might be fourteen, but I’m not stupid. Bad things come in sixes, and although crazy isn’t something you catch like a cold, it can get passed around. We have two other Jaycees at our school; there’s the smart one and the pretty one, and right now I’m the one with the dead mom, but like hell I’ll become the crazy one.
Which Jaycee? The one who’s a varsity cheerleader.
* * *
Sitting in the gym next to Liza waiting for the new team roster to be announced probably wasn’t the smartest decision, on one account of Liza openly hating the cheerleaders (a feeling which they gratefully reciprocated) and on the double account of her openly being uncool, but I figured if they didn’t want me on the team it would be too late for them to change their minds. Plus, Liza knew I cared even if she didn’t give a rip, so in the weeks leading up to today she went so far as to stop muttering things like pedestrian pom-pom twirlers and single-minded flippers of farce and folly when they tittered past her in the locker room before gym. Liza even stopped trying to convince me to join her damn book club, which I figure I’ll sign up for if I don’t make the team to show my appreciation. We might be freshman girls, but we’re not that self-absorbed.
Try-outs late last week went really well. Most of the other new girls fell or forgot to smile, but I did everything. Most of the varsity girls can’t do a triple back handspring. We had a week of mock-practice before the final try-out where we worked on basket lifts and cupies. I was the only freshman who stuck a perfect layout twist after a round-off. And when they lifted me into the air, when they threw me, I swear I felt no fear. It was like swimming in warm water. I was beaming. I knew, right then, that after the summer of climbing the apple tree and doing jumping jacks and drilling gymnastic moves, that the squad would be my Third Thing.
But in the gym I wasn’t so sure anymore. I was gripping Liza’s hand so tight I didn’t realize when they called my name. It was Liza shaking me, pushing me, and hollering, “Go! What are you waiting for?” like she was actually excited that got me off the bleachers, across the lacquered gym floor, and over to the squad’s table where they handed me a set of pom-poms, meant as a symbol of my place on the team. I shook them and vibrated with open-mouth laughter. Us new girls stood to one side, squealing and congratulating each other. I hugged Sarah Kim even though we’ve hated each other since kindergarten.
This, I thought, is the beginning of the best of my Three Things. This, I thought, will make up for all the rest. There are a lot of rumors about cheerleaders: they’re slutty, they’re stupid, they’re shallow, but everyone knows that for all their faults cheerleaders aren’t crazy.
* * *
The night Mom left, I woke up to get a glass of water. I was walking back to my room when I heard something outside, so I went to the window in the hall and looked out over the front yard. There was Mom, walking to the car. She looked almost drunk, stumbling, walking to forward and back between the car and the house like she was being pulled somewhere she didn’t want to go or couldn’t decide what to do. Eventually, she got into the car and the headlights illuminated the dirt driveway and the ratty peed-on rosemary bush. I watched her reverse, then pull forward and drive down the road. I watched those headlights until I couldn’t anymore, then tip-toed back to my room. I thought about waking Dad but not really.
Jackson was on the fold-out bed next to my desk breathing in a way that sounded like he wasn’t asleep, but I didn’t say anything. I pulled the covers over my head, turned toward the wall, and listened to his breathing until it changed from forced to nothing to soft.
* * *
When I got home from school with my new pom-poms, Dad was working late, so I only told Jackson. He howled and punched my arm like I’d won the World Series and got me a bowl of ice cream. We normally argue about movies, but he let me pick this time and he didn’t argue. Jackson seemed genuinely happy for me. He’s a shit and a half more than half the time, but he’ll grow out of it and we both know that
Jackson falls asleep a quarter of the way through Ten Things I Hate About You. I know it’s an old movie and kind of stupid and one of the main characters died of an overdose years after it was filmed, which is weird to think about because he’s so young and hunky in this movie. I’ve read Taming of the Shrew, and the movie’s way better. Plus, it doesn’t have all that sexist garbage at the end. You heard me right: I’m fourteen and I’ve read something by Shakespeare that wasn’t assigned for school. So what? Shoot me.
My favorite part about this movie is Kat. I love how unapologetic and cool she is without fitting in. Liza is like that sometimes, when she’s not being super weird. I don’t know if I’d want to be like that even if I could. Jackson starts to drool in his sleep like he does and Kat starts to talk about how she had sex with that jock asshole only once. She tells her sister, “Right after Mom left.” I move Jackson’s empty ice cream bowl off his lap. It’s probably kind of a good thing he’s asleep. I know he misses Mom, and he doesn’t need reminders. He’s been checking out books about aliens from the library. I found the newspaper clipping from two days after they found Mom’s empty car—“Search Continues for Mother of Two”—on his desk. He’d taken a red pen to it, crossed parts out so all the lines I knew by heart weren’t legible anymore: suspected suicide, presumably drowned, history of depression, no note or sign of a struggle. I think about how Heath Ledger is dead and how Dad isn’t home even though the dealership closed hours ago and how he didn’t want a funeral because we never found a body and it’s not like we have any family out here anyway. I turn off Ten Things I Hate About You, pull a blanket over Jackson, and go to the kitchen to rinse our bowls. I look outside and think about the lights.
The dark yard is quiet. The apple tree shudders in the wind. I wonder if Jackson has seen them—probably not. If he had, he would’ve told me. Or maybe not—maybe he has seen them, and wants proof before he tells me. Maybe he just needs a good story. Maybe he just doesn’t want to believe Mom drove to the shore, walked into the water, and never came out. Maybe he feels guilty, too.
* * *
That night I dream I’m swimming. The water is opaque and endless. I can hear seagulls and the squad girls in the distance braying and laughing. There’s the rustle of pom-poms like leaves in the wind, although I think I’m miles from shore where they are. The moon heads over the horizon, brighter than normal. I keep swimming, this time toward it. It illuminates the waves, and I can see the dark spots—Mare Frigoris, Mare Crisium: Sea of Cold, Sea of Crisis—clearly. I know the names of lunar maria because we learned about them in school, and now they’re just ahead. The moon swells, a fraction of the circle dipped into the water. I paddle toward Mare Serenitatis, Sea of Serenity.
When I’m paddling I notice my arms are not my arms. They’re thinner and paler and have age spots and a mole on the inside of the left wrist. They are my mom’s arms. I’m wearing her wedding ring. I yell for her, and it is her voice. “Mom! Mom! Mom!”
Blue lights awaken below me. They tumble under the surface, bleary dots that grow larger and wider like sharks rising out of the deep, only as they swell toward me, I am not afraid. I feel one below my feet—Mom’s feet, I can see them incredibly clearly in the dark water even though they’re silhouetted by the light, I do not know how—and it lifts me up out of the water. I cling to it. The surface is warm and gelatinous, and it holds me. It feels like a jellyfish full of blood.
When I press down, it turns iridescent before rising back, like bread dough that’s ready to knead. The orb carries me upward into the sky, and the sounds of seagulls and cheerleaders and pom-poms fade into an electric buzzing. We float toward the moon, me and these blue-white jellyfish orbs, and everything becomes brighter and brighter until I can’t see anything at all, one bright orb colliding slowly with another, bleaching out everything else.
I don’t tell anyone about my dream. Not Liza or Dad, and most of all not Jackson. And at first it’s not hard, because there’s the squad and Liza’s book club, which I joined anyway, and groceries to shop for and homework to do, but it becomes harder. I stop looking out windows at night, because sometimes those blue lights are there and other times they’re not, and both things are equally bad. While Jackson thinks it was aliens for-sure, I think Mom really just might’ve been bonkers. She stayed up in her room all day and when she didn’t, it was usually to break, burn, or bury something. It’d been years since I’d seen her smile or laugh. I don’t want to see the lights and I don’t want Jackson to talk about aliens. Insanity is hereditary, is what, and although Jackson might not know what that means, I do. At least he’s smart enough not to talk to anyone else about it.
* * *
Back when it was Dad’s job to take care of us and Mom was still working for the library, she didn’t go nuts all at once. She’d have nightmares about things in the attic and make Dad check. He’d go up there and set out rat traps, but he never caught anything. When she said she heard them at night (and she never said they were talking to her, but you could tell in the way she talked about them, maybe like they were friends or maybe like they weren’t), we decided it might be bats and burned sulfur in tuna cans until the ceiling was marked with black spots.
Mom stopped going up there for Christmas wrapping and Halloween decorations and one winter she didn’t get any of our seasonal jackets. Dad, who thought she was hitting early menopause, did it for her. She started taking days off at the library, claiming she didn’t feel well enough to go out, claiming that she had a headache, claiming she was just too tired, and eventually when all those excuses ran out, she once or twice let it slip that she didn’t trust Dad with us in the house because he couldn’t hear Them.
After my dream, Jackson stopped going into the attic. He said he heard the rats or the bats or whatever they were and asked if I’d put more rat traps up there and if I thought we should burn more sulfur. I didn’t go up either, told him to forget it, said it was probably a family of squirrels.
We’d just finished dinner on the porch one night when he said, “I had a dream last night.” I watched the ice tip in my wet glass, melting.
When I acted like I didn’t hear him, he continued. “I dreamed Mom was a in the attic, that she was like a ghost but a not-ghost with other not-ghosts. I dreamed that they were the ones who took her.”
“I thought you said it was aliens.”
“I don’t know.”
“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face it,” I whispered. “They found her car and shoes on the shore.”
“She wouldn’t leave us.”
I stood up to go inside and held my hand out for his meal tray. “Are you done already?”
* * *
It’s the first home game and I’m the flyer. And because getting on the squad is my Third Thing, I know tonight will be perfect.
Benjamin Keens is holding my feet in an extension. Jenna Marks is the back, so she’s supporting Benjamin’s wrists, but I don’t look down. I just know they’re there. I throw my hands above my head and smile and furiously shimmy my pom-pops. The boys on the bleachers, the one who shared cans of beer and cigarettes during the summer, are there in a jean-clad posse, and this time, they’re looking at me. The stadium lights are on and my lipstick is making my lips tacky and my throat is dry from screaming, but I smile full-teeth regardless. I clench my butt and upper abs like I was taught, for stability. My legs are locked.
That’s when I see her: she’s on the back row of the bleachers and her skin is so pale it’s like it glows and I think of my dream and in an instant the noise of the crowd falls away and I can’t hear the crowd in the bleachers or the band even though I know they’re playing “My Sharona” and I should be paying attention for the next beat in the music but I can’t hear and I don’t know when Benjamin is supposed to toss me since I can’t hear that beat and I see my pom-pops fluttering toward the ground before I know I dropped them. My arms fall too, limp at my sides. My body is a jellyfish full of blood, let go slack.
The world narrows on her face. She’s not smiling and she’s not sad, she’s just staring like taxidermy animals do: nothing behind her eyes. Her skin looks like the moon and blue lights spin up from behind the bleachers and get so bright the stadium lights dim and I feel cold in waves like the ocean and I don’t see the ground or the sky and there is screaming and screaming and screaming. When I lean back and look toward the sky, it swells and undulates with blue lights and they expand until they cover everything and I don’t feel Benjamin’s hands on my ankles and I can’t tell if I’m falling or floating, being swallowed or lifted, if I’m suffocating or full of air. The screaming grows so loud it falls away and through the cacophony I hear her: Plum Sugar Plum Sugar PlumSugar Plumsugar plumsugarplumsugarplumsugarplumsugar.
I don’t know if she’s come for me or if I’ve come undone.
Which Jaycee?