Free Free Verse by Sarah Dooley

“You’ve been playing with your hair.” My hair is on day two of a braid. It’s nearly all frizz at this point, the core of the braid hidden by loose tangles. The rubber band at the bottom is barely hanging on.
    I wash my hands again. Phyllis isn’t watching as closely, so I don’t use as much soap.
    â€œWhen you’re finished, you can grease the tin,” she tells me.
    â€œI don’t know how to do that.”
    â€œOh, for heaven’s sake.” Phyllis puts down the bowlshe’s been drying and crosses to me. “How you have made it this far in life is beyond me, girl . . .” Her voice fades out, but she’s still muttering under her breath. I catch something about “kids today” and I tune out.
    Mikey steps in before Phyllis can take over my job. “
I
know,” he says. He shows me how to smear butter all over the muffin tin. “My mom taught me all about cooking. Now your muffins won’t stick,” he explains. “If you don’t do this part, everything sticks to the tin, and when you pick up a muffin, you only get the top. Shirley uses cooking spray, but it doesn’t taste as good. She and Dad got in a fight about it once.”
    â€œThat’s a weird thing to get in a fight over,” I say.
    â€œShirley and my dad get in fights over a lot of weird stuff.”
    â€œI need a measurer and a mixer,” Phyllis says. “Any takers?”
    I eye the mixing bowl with concern. “This is the part where the wheels tend to come off the wagon,” I tell her. I’m thinking of the time I tried to make dinner for Michael and the kitchen ended up splattered in raw eggs.
    â€œYou didn’t know how to preheat the oven or grease a muffin tin, and
this
is the part where the wheels tend to come off the wagon?”
    â€œWell, there are a lot of wheels on a wagon,” I tell her. “More than one can come off.”
    Mikey cracks up laughing and drops the measuring cup.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    We sing while we wait for the muffins. Mikey has cheered up a lot. I’ve heard him described as a handful, and half the reason I invited him over was morbid curiosity, to find out how much of a handful he is. But so far he’s measured ingredients and helped wash the dishes. He has, without being told, wiped down the table with a dishrag, which never would have occurred to me. He already knows the words to half of Phyllis’s songs. Sure, he’s got a colorful vocabulary. But overall, Mikey seems a lot less of a handful than me.
    We eat muffins and watch a scary movie on cable. Phyllis gasps every time a fake zombie jumps out, and I have to explain how you can tell they’re fake, not just because I don’t think zombies really exist, but also because you can see the makeup lines.
    â€œThat’s not true!” Mikey says. He’s got melted chocolate chips smeared all over his face, and strawberries down the front of his shirt. “Real zombies have makeup lines just to fool you into thinking they’re fake zombies! Then when you lean in to ask, ‘Is this CoverGirl or Maybelline?’—that’s the two kinds of makeup Shirley uses to chase
her
zombie face away—that’s when they pounce and rip your face off and . . . and bake it into muffins!”
    â€œDon’t tell her that; now she’ll never eat one!” Phyllisswats him lightly. “And don’t talk about your stepmom that way!” Then she asks me, “Why don’t you try a bite? It won’t bite you back!” She’s eaten half a muffin already. Mikey’s on his third. I’ve been picking the walnuts out of mine, because I changed my mind about them.
    â€œThe walnuts look a little grosser than I thought they would,” I explain. “I can sort of picture these being zombie muffins. The walnuts could be . . . gnarled finger