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Show Choir practice for Mindy.

She looked like another Jenny in the making, front row, with a solo, in the freshman choir, but there would never be another Jenny, never another solo like Bésame Mucho. Kiss Me a Lot. For some reason that had me heading over to the west gym to do homework in the bleachers while watching boys basketball, and--lo and behold! No Lexi tonight.

Truly, there is something to be said for intuition. What muse had inspired me to imagine Dale Zubrod might act on my bogus tip about Lexi? A bit of fact had to enter the equation. All the girls, except me, thought the Zubrod brothers were hot. All the guys lusted after Lexi and Alicia and their kind, all of them prototypes of the Hooters Girls, with makeup concealing every flaw, glamorous hair, push-up bras, tight jeans. A look that took an hour to create every morning. Mindy was on that path.

Mom and I had been watching that girl her like Ted watching steak on the grill. Mindy barely ate, with Jenny missing. Mom wasn’t doing a lot better. Shutting down, basically. Not talking, not nagging us, just doing all the housework and even more of the outside chores as well, always working, moving, doing something, anything but talking.
I finished my biology homework and moved on to math, but thoughts of Mindy and Jenny were distracting me even more than the sight of Ethan’s long, muscular legs and long, strong arms on the basketball court. He was storming tonight. Aggressive. Getting fouled, something he normally never did. “Frasier,” Coach Sullivan growled at him. “What’s gotten into you?”

Trying to feel guilty, and failing, I flipped to a picture of Pythagoras in our math book. He was cool. Always seeking perfection and finding it everywhere he looked.

My gaze strayed back to Ethan.

There was a better image of ol' Pyth in one of Ethan’s video games, Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy.

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Now, that didn't look like a math nerd who exalted the mind while denying the flesh. One of the weaknesses of Pythagoreanism is its one-sided exaltation of the mind and knowledge and its corresponding denigration of the material world and body, some argued. But that was typical of the golden age of the Greeks, not Pythagoras specifically. He would have liked Jenny. She celebrated the spirit and the mind without neglecting the body, the way nerds and geeks of the 21st Century are reviled for.

Poor Ethan. How many times did he go through a phase of wearing flood water pants due to his latest growth spurt? Jenny had scored major points with him after pointing out the latest fashion of businessmen in Chicago wearing shoes without socks and pants that were too short, until some designer said otherwise.

Apparently with much surprise

to this unhappy flower----See, I knew my Emily D, whether or not I liked reading her stuff while Jenny was missing--Ethan wandered up to me in the bleachers. I blinked. Practice was over, and I was in a Pythagorean thicket of thoughts about Jenny.

"Hey." He nudged, rather than slugged, my arm. A kinder and gentler Ethan, here.

I smiled up at him, feeling like a fool.

"You and your math gods," he said.

He exuded another night's hot, humid energy spent. I felt his nearness and smelled the salty wetness of his skin less than an inch from me. Hey. We farm girls like earthy scents, not cologne. God help those boys wandering around in clouds of Axe and American Eagle poured from a bottle.

"I need to go get Mindy," I blurted out.

Idiot! I am a total idiot!

"Laters, then, Ben-Butt." He bounded down the risers and ran into the locker room. I slammed my math book against my head. Which made me laugh, because I thought of that scene in Monte Python and the Holy Grail, when the chanting monks say Domine whatever, then whack themselves upside the head. I made sure I had the free wi-fi connection before hunting for the scene on You-Tube. I replayed it about ten times in a row because I had exhausted the funny cat videos and I desperately needed a laugh. Then I had to google what the monks were chanting: Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Blessed Lord Jesus, grant them rest.

But there is no rest for the wicked,

and that got me thinking about the Feckers family. The tyrant dad Lester and his rotten sons, Kenny, Ronnie, Billy, and Don-Don. The meek little mother died of an aneurysm in the brain while she was four months along with the fifth, who died with her. If there was any kind of justice in the world, Lester and the boys would have died in a fiery car wreck, and Mary Feckers would have lived with Number Five.

I packed up my laptop and books and headed over to the theater to catch the end of Mindy’s show choir practice. I had missed her solo, but she was standing in the front row watching Alicia Angel’s little sister Alexis singing hers. I made a mental note never, ever to name a child of mine Alicia, Alexis, Lexi, or any variation on those names. I wouldn’t even give them to a dog. To a calf destined for the slaughter, ok, yeah, I could see myself doing that.
Alexis Angel was in full chest voice, belting out Who will love me as I am. For Ty Christy’s benefit, I got out my phone and started filming so he could see how lame show choir is and how my sisters had subjected me to it. I was thinking about salmon and spawning, thanks to the dorky lyrics:

Like a fish plucked from the ocean
Tossed into a foreign stream
Always knew that I was different
Often fled into a dream
I ignored the raging current
Right against the tide I swam
But I floated with the question
Who will love me as I am?
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I shifted the lens away from dopey Alexis and focused on Mindy, looking pretty in her long blonde hair and beatific smile. Now there was a girl whose name should be Angel. Standing beside Harry Dobbin, she looked more like a fifth grader than a freshman--and Harry was only average in height.

Then she listed to one side in slow motion. Something was wrong with her. I stood. Mindy. Oh God. Mindy.

Harry caught her before she could hit the floor.

It looked like a dream, like a well-practiced move. Harry stood there holding my sister in his arms. The combo stopped playing. I ran to the stage. Mrs. Mains, the director, waved everyone aside except Harry and me. He knelt with Mindy in his arms, and I realized my camera was still filming. I shoved it in my pocket. Someone held out Mindy’s BPA plastic water bottle the pink ladybug print, and Mrs. Mains took it, kneeling in front of Mindy.

“I’m ok,” Mindy slurred. “It’s just...the air in here.”

She wasn’t eating or sleeping. Because of Jenny. She’d get herself killed before Jenny found her way home. Half of me wanted to slap some sense into her, but the other half wanted to hug her. My life, my whole family’s, kept threatening to turn into a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Not under my watch. I'd be strong enough for all five of us.

There’s no business like show business, though, and Mrs. Mains got everyone back in their places. Mindy drank her water and nibbled on a protein bar and sat on a chair stage left, telling me it was totally normal to faint during school concerts, which was statistically all too true. Mom could sort her out when we got home. Mindy refused to leave early, however. Stupid choir directors wouldn’t force a sick kid home unless he or she was vomiting in plain sight.

Frowning, grumbling, and muttering dire threats for nobody but me to hear, I stepped down from the stage--and plowed right into a head-on collision with a male torso.

“Hey. Watch your step, Ben-Butt.”

Ethan!

Instinctively, I did that thing dogs do, pressing my forehead against his chest. Stupid, stupid. I could barely handle the deluge of emotions this guy threatened to uncork with a mere hand on my shoulder, but we had crashed into each other full-frontal and he smelled like Irish Spring and I was galvanized to him. My knees turned to molten zinc.

“Come here, you.” Ethan started walking to a row of seats where my coat and backpack were parked. He towed me until he sat down by my stuff and pulled me into the seat beside him. “Listen, you. You always look like you’re doing fine, but are you?” His gaze shifted to Mindy on stage left. “Is Mindy ok?”

“I don’t know. I worry about her. I worry about everyone.”

The stupid fish song was going full-swing again. Alexis Angel belted out her line: “Who will love me as I am?” and the tempo shifted into overdrive. Crazy Mindy popped out of her chair and returned to Harry Dobbin, her partner.

“That Mindy!” I caught myself clenching my fists, then took a deep breath and let it out. “Mom isn’t herself. She hasn’t yelled at me even once since the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Mindy drags herself around like a limp rag until she gets here. The song and dance routine bring her back to life.”

“And you,” Ethan said, “would rather get suspended from school than go to a dance.”

“Yep.” I wanted to ask him if he was all broken hearted over Lexi, but I couldn’t go there.

“But you were secretly hoping the exotic new kid with the physics brain would ask you.”

“What?”

“Come on Kristy. Ty Christy turned your head, and you didn’t turn it back my way again.”

“Whoa!” I sat up straight. “Excuse me. Lexi went breathing pheromones all over you and you didn’t look at me again.”

“Because you were hung up on the new guy!”

“I was not.” But I was breathing fast and hard now, and my face burned hot as a blacksmith’s forge.

He was breathing hard too. His forehead was almost touching mine. Our lips couldn’t be far behind.

“Just show your face at the dance Friday, all right?” he said a little hoarsely.

“Well, if you put it that way, ok. I’ll dig up a dress and submit to being incarcerated with hot, smelly boys and brainless girls for four miserable hours.”

Our foreheads touched now. “I can make sure it won’t be totally miserable.”

“Ok.”

He drew back, laughing that old familiar laugh.

"What?"

“You. Me. I put Breanna up to breaking the ice with Ty by telling her she’s so brilliant and so cute, which is mostly true, and that Ty is in awe of her. I figured that was close enough to being true, her thinking so would make it so. I don’t know if their bond is just platonic, but it served its purpose.”

Like an idiot I just stared at him with my jaw hanging.

“Funny you should just happen to come up with the same idea, getting Zubrod all fired up.” He fist-bumped my shoulder, like always, and yet like no time ever before. His eyes were sparkling and his smile was wider than ever. “Thank you, by the way. I’ll admit, I was flattered and all, at first, but that Lexi. She’s…” His voice cracked, which was nothing unusual even for guys his age. “She’s easy to look at but hard to listen to. She’ll never be like you. There will never be another you.”

Oh God. This was it. This was how it felt, to like someone and be liked in return. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would explode.

He stood, zipped his coat, and tousled my hair. “See ya tomorrow. And the next day. Sara Lacey and I have been talking, and we want you to come with us when Rosary Guy does his thing Saturday.”

“What?”

Dang. That seemed to be the only word I could utter around him tonight.

“Call me when you get home. If your dad is still ballistic about using up cell phone minutes, use the landline. If anyone listens in, I don’t care.”

“Ok.”

Correction: there seemed to be only two words left in my vocabulary. I stood too, resisting the urge to grab his coat in both fists and keep him with me.

“Not just me,” he said, “but Lacey and Ty and Breanna will be checking on you. And Mindy. And we’re gonna find Jenny.”

“Ok.”

His smile, impossibly, got even wider and brighter.

“Laters, Kris.” He made a phone gesture with his hand by his ear, the good ear, not the one Ken Feckers blew up.

Ethan. Ethan. Ethan!

How long I stood there after he walked off, I don’t know, but Mindy was all too perky and smiling when she stood in front of me, coated and mittened. “Earth to Kris. It’s time to go home.”

My feet moved, but my head was in the stars.

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End of Day 31 -but not The End!

wc 2213
wc for all of March: 26,692

Thank you, everyone who's read and commented and encouraged me to keep going when I was ready to call it quits!

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