Free The Household Spirit by Tod Wodicka Page A

working together silently, the only time they were really entirely serious with each other, hour after hour and not a single slip into irony. That was their sacred space, and these were things that she hadn’t mentioned to anyone at school—ever. Why? Because plants and grandfathers were uncool? Partly, sure. But were they really
that
uncool? More uncool than time-share Disney World vacations and Jesus? No, it was something else: something like, if she told a girl about her garden, then, naturally, she’d have to tell her all about her grandfather too, about their perfectly contained world and—and then she’d be too close to what happened to her at night. Her sleep problems. And then what would they think? Well, they’d think something like: you are obviously not right in the head, Emily Phane, and you are therefore unworthy of being a friend, best or otherwise. Because, actually, what was Emily even supposed to think? The worlds didn’t fit. Emily had to keep things separate, uncontaminated. Later, she’d recognize that some of her let’s call them social problems stemmed from this, maybe a lot of them. But on that day, Jess set something off simply by telling Emily how much cooler the trees in Arizona were. The trees in Arizona, she said, were cacti. She said they even grew giant flowers. She said how her brother would go out into the desert with his friends and their uncle’s rifle and shoot the shit out of them. To Emily, this was a little burst of light. It was what she’d been waiting for and she couldn’t resist, needed to know more, not about massacring cacti necessarily but about how you took care of plants in Arizona, the desert soil—or sand?—and she wanted to know all about the garden that Jess never once mentioned having in Tucson but surely had, secretly had, just like Emily. Emily felt it. Jess loved to garden.
    “Garden?”
Jess said.
    “Mine’s amazing,” Emily whispered.
    They were outside waiting to be picked up after troupe rehearsals.It was January, dark, windy; a bone-dry snow hissed around their feet, weightless in the freezing halogen light of the Queens Falls Middle School parking lot.
    Jess laughed. “You’re hilarious, Emily Phane! Oh my God, I love your sense of humor. I know, right? Who
gardens
?”
    Emily balked, recovered, said, “Old people garden.” She laughed. “Me and really old people. Obviously.”
    The ability to crack Jess Yarsevich up overrode any sense of betrayal. Gardens, Jess repeated, wondering why such things existed. Before they moved to Queens Falls, she’d given her brother’s friend, Quint Ferris, a blow job, she said, suddenly. “Speaking of gardens—”
    Emily felt as if she’d been thrown into a pool. She had never heard anything like this before. She couldn’t help staring at Jess’s mouth. The same mouth that had just been singing “Parents Are People” and “Don’t Dress Your Cat in an Apron.” Jess told her how to give Quint Ferris a killer blow job.
    “Did it hurt?”
    Jess said, “What, why would it hurt?”
    Emily thought that it was supposed to hurt a little.
    Fourteen wasn’t an approaching age so much as a whole new freaking planet, and one that Emily wanted to immigrate to ASAP. Couldn’t she just skip thirteen altogether? Maybe, she decided, and maybe this secondhand blow-jobbing was her visa. Because there could only be one thing going on here, don’t miss your chance.
    “Jess,” she blurted. “You’re my best friend!”
    Sharpened silence, wind. It was like a nightmare where you suddenly can’t find your legs. You look and look and: no legs. No nothing. The moment was false. Emily knew it. Jess probably knew it. Best friend? Best crap. It was like the snow around them had suddenly become confetti, had always been confetti, the mountains in the distance nothing but flat Adirondack Children’s Troupe scenery. Pretty soon the trees would start singing about gender equality.The moon hoisted up with ropes. It was so