Free Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan Page A

bathroom.
    Now Jake finished his hair, stepped back, and tripped over Winston, who was lying behind him. The dog yelped and leaped to his feet so that Jake stumbled over him again, cracking his elbow on the sink and his knee on the toilet before he got his balance. He swore. “What’s the matter with you, dog? Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Winston stared up at him with those sad, droopy eyes and wagged his tail. The overwhelming impulse to boot the dog out into the hall vanished. Jake reached down and rubbed the dog behind his ears. There. That proved it. The Jake he knew, the Jake he had always been, was disappearing. And there was nothing—nobody—to put in his place.

Chapter Thirteen
    E .D. was alone in the schoolroom, sitting at the computer with her hands pressed over her ears. Jake and his canine shadow, Winston, had gone into Traybridge with Archie to get some supplies for the wood shop, and Lucille had taken Destiny along to the library. Jeremy Bernstein was still staying in Dogwood Cottage. He had decided to write a book about what he insisted on calling the Applewhite Artistic Dynasty, and he had been practically monopolizing the schoolroom computer, working on the book and exchanging e-mails with his TVfriend, trying to arrange a documentary about them all, or a story on a magazine show at least. But he was out in the wood shop now. It was a chance to get online and do her math. Except that she couldn’t concentrate.
    E.D. had always thought you could get used to sounds, the way you got used to smells after a while. Sensory fatigue , it was called. You would get so you didn’t notice anymore. Like Destiny’s nonstop chatter. She’d told Jake it was like getting used to a refrigerator motor. And she’d been right. Everybody got used to Destiny. You couldn’t survive in this family otherwise.
    But this was different. This was worse. Much, much worse. This was torture. She’d heard somewhere that when the cops or the FBI or somebody had wanted to end a siege with a militant cult, they’d beamed rock and roll music at them from high-powered speakers. She could understand why it would work. Only they shouldn’t have used rock and roll. They should have used The Sound of Music . It would have been faster. After twenty-four hours the people in the cult would have laid down their guns and come out on their hands and knees, eyes as crazed as Wolfie’s, singing compulsively about female deer and kitten whiskers.
    For five days now her father had been playing the CD of The Sound of Music all day, every day. He said he needed to totally immerse himself in the musicalambiance of the show. So everybody was being totally immersed in the musical ambiance of the show. Her mother had begged him to use earphones, but he refused, of course. “They not only destroy your eardrums, they mess up your brain waves!” So the music blared out from the living room speakers, not just through the whole of the main house, but out the open windows and all over Wit’s End.
    Upstairs Hal had gone almost silent for a while after the UPS man dropped off a roll of chicken wire and two gigantic bags of plaster. The sign on his door that had once read HAL APPLEWHITE , PAINTER now said HAL APPLEWHITE , SCULPTOR . But whatever he was sculpting with chicken wire and plaster, Hal had taken up hammering again. Purely, E.D. thought, in self-defense. Sybil had turned up the volume on the white noise machine in her office and had taken to wearing earmuffs in order to keep writing her Great American Novel.
    Cordelia swore the sound carried out to the dance studio. Her ballet, she claimed, was changing from a discordant tragedy to something resembling a polka. Most days Lucille stayed in Wisteria Cottage with all the doors and windows closed and the curtains drawn. She said it was the only way she could write poetry that didn’t fall into rhymes like thread and bread , mitten and kitten. E.D. figured it was the music that had sent