The Art of Adapting Read online

  Uncle Matt was just as restless, rearranging his fork, knife, and napkin over and over, carefully lining them up, waiting for his food. Lana kept watching him as if this stressed her out. Abby thought Matt seemed calm enough, almost robotic a lot of the time, but Lana treated him like he was always about to blow a fuse or something.

  Matt was Lana’s new project, now that Abby’s dad had moved out. Lana hadn’t even asked what Abby or Byron thought. She just came back from visiting Matt in the hospital and told Abby and Byron that he was moving in. She assumed they would be fine with having their weird uncle thrown into the mix just months after their family was ripped in half. Not that Abby wasn’t fine, mostly. But she wanted Lana to care about the times when she wasn’t. Her mom didn’t even seem to notice.

  Abby had been a straight-A student for years. Forever, actually. Until now. But did Lana make as much of a fuss about Abby’s falling grades as she did about Matt’s dinner? Well, it was only one grade, but that was bad enough, a total humiliation to Abby, who had always been the “smart” kid. (Byron was the “athlete,” never mind that Abby was a pretty good soccer player.) Abby had pulled a C on her chemistry midterm and tanked her whole grade and perfect GPA. She’d pretended it was just a onetime brain-freeze to blame, and her mom had bought it, because she wanted not to have to care, Abby could tell. But then her teacher, Mr. Franks, had emailed her mom and said Abby was behind on lab reports, too. The jerk. Lana sighed and hugged Abby like it was Lana’s fault somehow, like the separation had caused Abby to temporarily forget how to take a simple test or do her lame labs. Abby was relieved to dodge a lecture on the bad chem progress report, especially when Lana agreed not to tell Graham about it, but Abby also felt annoyed that she was turning into a screwup and her mom didn’t even ask why. Not that Abby would’ve told her.

  Lana finally served Matt and Abby, sat down, and started putting a steady stream of bites in her mouth like she was in an eating contest. It wasn’t the way Lana ate before, with Graham still in the house, but it was how she always ate now, shoveling and swallowing without much time spent on chewing. It reminded Abby of back when they used to go to the beach and she and Byron would play sea turtles. They’d dig a hole in the sand, throw a couple of rocks or shells in to be the eggs, and use their hands like flippers to chuck sand behind them, trying to fill the hole in before a big wave came up and did the job for them. Abby wasn’t sure what hole Lana was trying to fill these days, but she didn’t want to have to watch.

  Abby’s stomach was a mess. She was hungry and queasy at the same time, all the time. She pushed the food around her plate and watched Uncle Matt. He had to arrange everything a certain way before he could eat. Matt used the same plates and bowls for his food every meal, and he got all freaked out if things were out of sync. No food could touch other food. If his corn and slab of meatloaf collided, Abby was pretty sure he’d have a quiet, choking meltdown, like someone having a seizure.

  Abby thought she was the only one with food issues until she met Matt. She had nothing on him. She ate a bite of corn, but regretted it the moment it was in her mouth. The little kernels gushed their sweet contents as she bit down on them. She could taste the sugar, the calories, and something about the way the mushy corn-guts oozed onto her tongue, like fish eggs popping, made her ill. Then there were the pulpy remains of the corn, that weird shiny skin that hardly seemed like food. It gave her the willies. Abby tucked the corn into her cheek and started another round of her exercises, tightening and releasing while her mother ate, two feet away, oblivious to how annoying her ravenous eating habits were.

  Abby was always thinking about food, which was a funny pastime for someone who hated eating. For breakfast every day she had a bowl of Cheerios (the plain kind, not the sugary ones) and a glass of chocolate milk. She’d decided to give up the chocolate milk, but she hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet. It was little-kid food, and she was fourteen now. Plus, it was empty calories. She was always starving in the morning, and usually a little light-headed, and the protein-sugar combination seemed to do the trick to get her going each day. So maybe she wouldn’t give up the chocolate milk. She’d just lose the calories from somewhere else.

  “Are you eating or playing?” Lana asked. Abby looked up to see if her mom was talking to her or Matt. Of course it was her. She pointed at Uncle Matt, to show he was also doing weird and unnecessary food rearranging. Lana narrowed her eyes at Abby. Matt had Asperger’s, which was fancy medical-speak for not having normal manners. Abby took another bite of the corn, chewing slowly with her eyes shut for her mom’s benefit. It was all she could do to make herself swallow it. Her throat tightened and threatened not to let it go down, but she chased it with a big gulp of water and down it went. She sighed, relieved. Throwing up on the table would probably send Matt into a conniption. Lana shook her head and clucked her tongue. Abby used to be her mom’s favorite child, but lately it seemed like nothing she did really made her mom happy. But Byron, who was skipping yet another dinner at home to mooch off his friend Trent’s family, could do no wrong. Absence made the heart grow fonder.

  “The corn is cold,” Matt said.

  “Yeah, it is,” Abby agreed.

  “Well, it was warm when we started. If you both ate when you were served . . .”

  “I can’t eat corn before meatloaf. Brown, orange, yellow,” Matt said. He pointed from his meatloaf to his carrots to his corn. Abby had to stifle a laugh. He had a crazy color code to everything he did. It was kind of cool, to see an adult acting like a kid, but it was also kind of annoying, because he got away with it.

  “Why does brown have to come first?” Abby asked. Her mother shot her a look, but Lana was the one who kept telling her and Byron to treat Uncle Matt like a normal part of the family, and that’s the kind of question you’d ask in a normal family.

  “Because it’s a blend of three colors. Orange is a blend of two. Yellow is a primary color,” Matt said. He wasn’t snippy about it. He seemed to like the question. Abby nodded and looked at Lana, who was also nodding. It was still nuts, but it seemed less crazy when you knew the system.

  “Where does the milk come in?” Abby asked.

  “Last, of course,” Matt said. “White is the absence of color.”

  “In paint, sure, but in light, white is all of the colors together,” Abby said, proud that she knew this. Her mom gave her another look, no doubt for mucking with Uncle Matt’s system. Matt was looking around his plate, taking this in. He shook his head.

  “Food isn’t light. These vegetables are from plants. Many paint colors come from plant matter.”

  “But milk doesn’t. It comes from cows. So does the meatloaf.”

  Matt stared at his plate some more. She’d gotten him there. The system had holes.

  “It’s turkey meatloaf,” Lana said.

  “Yuck,” Abby said. As if she’d like cow meatloaf any better.

  “Eat your dinner,” Lana said to her. She rose and took Matt’s bowl of untouched corn and warmed it up in the microwave.

  Matt waited, zombielike, until the warmed corn had returned, and then he went back to eating. Abby guessed the conversation was over.

  “Can I be excused?” she asked.

  “You hardly ate.”

  “I have chemistry homework.”

  Lana looked at Abby’s plate. “I can make you something else to eat,” she said. “You can take it up with you.”

  Then Abby felt bad. She didn’t mean to reject her mom’s cooking. She just didn’t feel like eating. Matt was done with the browns and oranges and on to the yellow food, eating his corn in careful bites, seven kernels at a time on his favorite spoon, like always. Abby just couldn’t watch it anymore.

  Lana made Abby a sandwich, even though Abby said she wasn’t hungry, and Abby took it up to her room along with her ice water. She pulled out her chemistry book and set her journal inside it, just in case her mom checked on her. Abby kept two journals, which was pretty time-consuming, but everyone
knew that it was best to leave a decoy journal full of mindless blather out for your mother to find, while you hid the real one full of your secret feelings somewhere safe. Abby was pretty sure that Lana didn’t read even her fake journal—she seemed too busy scrambling around cooking and cleaning stuff for that, but it was still better to keep up both journals, just in case. Abby finished an entry about how happy she was to get a goal in the last soccer game, set that journal on her desk, then pulled her real journal from under her mattress. These days she mostly wrote about Gabe in that one.

  Abby was pretty sure she’d be doing fine in chem if Gabe Connor weren’t in her class. He made it hard to concentrate. Gabe was the captain of the boys’ soccer team at school, and he was broad and tanned and flawless in every way. He was also oblivious to Abby’s existence, despite the fact that he usually helped out with the girls’ soccer team. Once he’d helped Abby get up when slutty Caitlin tripped her with her cowlike inability to get out of the damn way. Gabe’s hands were the perfect balance of soft skin and callused palms. Abby was a goner the moment he’d touched her.

  Gabe helped with his dad’s construction company sometimes, and all that hammering meant his chest and arms were just as muscular as his soccer-toned legs. He even smelled amazing. Gabe’s mom used these lavender-filled dryer pouches from Trader Joe’s in the laundry. Abby had seen them peeking out of the top of his mom’s grocery bag once when she came to pick Gabe up, back before he got his license. The lavender was subtle, earthy, not as girlie-smelling as you might think, and you had to be real close to pick up on it. Abby used them in her own laundry now. Lana thought they were a waste of money. Abby didn’t bother to explain, because her mom wouldn’t understand anything to do with having an interest in boys.

  While her dad was dating, first a blonde, now a redhead, as Abby had detected from the stray strands of hair on his couch and the second pillow on his bed, her mom hadn’t had a single date in the seven months since they’d split up. Not one. And it wasn’t like she wasn’t pretty. Lana had a good nose, full lips, wavy dark hair, and these amazing light brown eyes that were flecked with so much gold they were almost orange, like tiger’s-eye stones. Abby had light green-yellow eyes, pale and sickly, and her father’s flat dirty-blond hair. She was invisible on top of ordinary. Also, Lana had breasts, which Abby did not. Fourteen was the age of breasts, she’d noticed at school. But somehow the gene pool had dried up just when Abby came along, because there was nothing there.

  Abby was tall for her age, but she wasn’t what they called a “big girl,” which she was grateful for, because the queen bees at school were merciless to fat girls. Abby liked her long arms and long legs, but she worried about her stomach and she had bigger thighs than she wanted. If she squeezed the flesh on her thighs hard enough, she could see the pucker of cellulite under her pale skin. She wore clothes that hid her thighs, and she did her daily workout to keep them under control. She wished she had something else going for her, something really likable. Being smart didn’t count, or it didn’t back when she was still smart. The popular girls mocked the straight-A girls, and boys were oblivious to them. At least the boys Abby liked. Like Gabe, who had been dating one of the ditziest girls at school all year. Caitlin, who was as busty as she was dumb. The exact opposite of Abby in every way. So it was stupid that Abby was in love with Gabe, since she clearly wasn’t his type. But she really couldn’t help it. The harder she tried not to think about Gabe, the more she thought about him.

  Abby took out her aggressions on the peanut butter and honey sandwich her mother had made her. She mashed it flat and then rolled it into a tight ball. It held the sphere form pretty well. She opened her bedroom window and chucked it over the fence and into the neighbors’ yard, where she knew their dog would appreciate it. She hated to waste food, and at least that way someone was going to eat it. Of course, as soon as she tossed it away her stomach started to growl. She drank the whole glass of ice water in about ten seconds, and that shut her stomach up.

  Abby pulled out her exercise chart and got to work. She did two hundred crunches a day, four kinds of leg lifts (fifty reps each), and forty push-ups. She hated the push-ups the most, so she did those first. The leg lifts were the easiest. She’d seen these mountain-climber exercises in a TV ad, and she wanted to add them to her routine. They were half ab workouts and half leg workouts. She’d start with forty and see how it went. Working out was the best way to make any dark thoughts disappear, Abby had found. Afterward she felt exhilarated, invincible. Exercising made her light-headed and dizzy, but it was a good kind of dizzy, the kind where the warm fuzziness of her brain comforted her. The other kind of dizzy happened at school, or really anytime she sat up or stood up too fast. Pinpricks of light would scatter and dance before her eyes, her own private fireworks show, and her face would get hot, and sometimes she had to sit back down in a hurry to keep from going somewhere she didn’t want to go.

  Abby finished her journal entry by writing her name a few times, adding Gabe’s name to it. Abby Foster Connor. Abigail Leigh Foster Connor. Abigail Connor + Gabriel Connor. She admired the similarities of their first names. Abigail and Gabriel looked good together, and had almost the exact same letters. She was pretty sure neither one of them liked their full first name, since they were both quick to correct substitute teachers during roll call in chem. But written next to Gabriel, Abigail looked nice. Like they were meant to go together.

  4

  * * *

  Byron

  Byron resolved to quit smoking. Again. He straightened from his stooped coughing position and beat against his chest with the side of his fist, trying to kill the ticklish spot in his lungs that could only be quieted by another cigarette. He’d had a good run with it so far. He’d made his impression with the in crowd, had bridged the gap between the jocks and the rebels, and had worked his way into both groups, but now it was starting to affect his performance in the pool and on the track. Sometimes at top speed it felt like his lungs were stuffed with fiberglass insulation. All itchy and cottony. And according to his little sister, they put fiberglass in cigarettes, so he guessed the analogy was right. She was another reason to quit. Not because he wanted to set a better example for Abby, because there was no way his goody-two-shoes sister would ever smoke, but because if she’d figured it out, their mother couldn’t be far behind. And he really didn’t want his mom to know. Lana had enough going on without worrying about him developing lung cancer forty years down the line.

  Byron leaned against the porch railing waiting as Trent skateboarded down the sidewalk toward him. Byron heard him coming long before he saw him: the click, click, click across the sidewalk dividers. Trent stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, pulled out his phone, and started typing a text message. Byron heaved his backpack onto his shoulder, sauntered across the lawn, past the hedges, to jump the low picket fence that ran along the side of the yard. He was trying out some free-running techniques he’d seen on the Internet. He kicked his heels to one side and easily swung the lower half of his body over the fence without breaking stride. He nodded at his success and nudged Trent with his elbow.

  “Dude, that’s not to my mom, right? I texted you from her phone.” Byron used his mom’s phone sometimes, because his tightwad dad had him on the cheapest phone plan. If Byron or Abby went over their texting limit, they had to pay Graham for the extra charges out of their allowance. Luckily Lana liked it when they used her phone. She thought it showed how much they all trusted each other.

  “I know you did, jackass. I can tell what phone it came from. Hers says Lana. Yours says moron.” Trent kept typing.

  “So you’re not texting my mom?”

  Trent hit send, cocked his ear as he listened to the swoosh of a message going out into cyberspace, and gave Byron his new half-smile: arrogance layered on mystery. It was a new expression he’d been trying out. Byron had caught him practicing it in the mirror. Trent dropped into a crouch and karate-chopped Byron in the upper arm. Hard.


  “Asshole,” Byron said, shoving Trent aside.

  “You’re the asshole,” Trent said, pocketing his phone.

  Trent liked to flirt with Byron’s mom for reasons that Byron couldn’t begin to comprehend. Trent claimed she was hot, for one, which wasn’t true. It was his mom, for crap’s sake, wasn’t that against some code or something? But luckily Trent’s flirting was so inept that Lana hadn’t seemed to notice. Once in a while Trent sent her little smiley-face texts, which creeped Byron out, but made Lana happy, so he left it alone. Mostly.

  “No texting my mom, asshole.”

  “You can text mine,” Trent said, smirking again.

  Byron liked hanging out at Trent’s house best. His mom, Tilly, was definitely not a hot mom, she was three hundred pounds of nonstop chatter, but she was nice enough, and she was a great cook who always had leftovers to feed them. Tilly was divorced, alone, and needy, the loneliness seeping out of her pores as she watched them eat, wiping her sweaty forehead and neck with a wadded-up paper towel that lived in her left hand. Sometimes she tucked the paper towel into her cleavage when she thought Byron wasn’t looking. Tilly was a nervous talker, prone to asking a simple question, then talking for the next twenty minutes solid without giving the other person a chance to answer the damn question. It annoyed Byron at first, but he’d gotten used to it. She just wanted someone to listen, and he could do that while he ate.

  “What’d you have for dinner last night?” Byron asked, hopping onto Trent’s skateboard.