The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. The o on sorry quavered like a soap bubble.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

Lauren stared into the wood grain of the table. Something was spilling over, and she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t havewords for it. It was a tearful harmony over an organ line. Use your words was something Mom used to say to Sean when he was little. Or Mom said it to all three of them, but Lauren could only rememberher saying it to Sean. There must be so much that she’ll never remember.

“You can tell me anything, honey.”

“Mom?” Lauren asked. “Do you remember my birthday party?”

Mom laughed. “How could I forget it?”

“I wasn’t—I wasn’t nice to Mirela at my birthday party.”

Mom put up a hand. “Lauren. You are so sweet. Don’t worry about it. It’s so long ago now. And it was perfectly understandable.”

“No, I—”

“Anyone in your place would have been frustrated with how she behaved. That should have been your day. It’s okay, honey. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“But the thing is—”

“The important thing is—”

The phone was ringing, and Mom leapt up to get it. Often Mom let calls go to the answering machine, so she could screen thecaller. The other night she didn’t answer it at all. Maybe Mom was worried now that the ringing would wake Mirela. But shejumped up so fast to answer that her chair scraped the floor.

“Mom, could you—”

Mom held up a hand with a confidential, apologetic smile, as if she was going to get rid of the caller as soon as possible.She beeped the new cordless phone awake and put it to her ear. “Oh, hello, Dr. Zeller.” One of Mirela’s therapists, Lauren guessed.She couldn’t keep track of them all, and they all eventually disappeared anyway, so it wasn’t worth learning their names.Lauren could learn them all this summer, when she had more time to help out.

She held eye contact with Mom for a beat. Mom looked up at the ceiling and twirled her finger in the air, pantomiming herimpatience. She held the phone to her cheek with one hand and, with the other, raised the antenna.

“Could you tell them you’ll call back?” Lauren asked, but before she could finish, Mom turned her back to face out of thekitchen, toward the foyer.

Lauren panted. Like a dog, she thought.

“Yes, I see,” Mom was saying. “Well, what about—right, right.” She was walking slowly into the foyer, her head bowed in consultationwith the voice on the phone.

Lauren, still sitting at the kitchen table, heard the weak groan of the carpeted stairs beneath Mom’s feet. She walked intothe foyer to the bottom of the stairs and watched her mother climbing to the top, the tip of the phone’s antenna scrapingagainst the ceiling.

“Mom?” Lauren asked.

“In a minute, honey,” Mom’s silhouette said as she closed the bedroom door behind her.

“Mama,” Mirela said from the living room.

“Mom,” Lauren said, more insistently, to no one.

“Mama mama mama,” Mirela called. The syllables were sticky, like she was dreaming and trying to talk herself into waking up.

Now that Paula had quit the show and was refusing to spend study hall in Tedquarters, it meant that twice a week, from 2:10p.m., when Mr. Smith usually walked in after his post-lunch staff meeting, until about 2:30 p.m., when Stitch and Rajiv camesomersaulting or skateboarding in after Phys Ed, Mr. Smith was usually alone in Tedquarters. Lauren wondered why he was alwaysin there, why he never spent any downtime with his colleagues in the English department office, picking up some gardeningtips from Mrs. Bristol or catching up on back issues of the New York Review of Books that Mr. Treadwell stacked in his carrel.

“It’s so cute how you can get all that alone time with Ted,” Paula said. “I bet he always sits down right next to you.”

“Whatever,” Lauren said.

“You two are so close,” Paula said. “It’s crazy that you could get a lead role without really even trying out. I guess it’s just that he knowsyou so well.”

Depending on the day, if Mr. Smith had seemed moody in English class, if he’d waved Lauren off when she raised her hand, shethen had twenty minutes in Tedquarters to try to fix it, to convince him with a perfect offhand comment that she really haddone the assigned reading, no matter what he thought or assumed. And if English class had gone well, in Tedquarters she could,as Dad would say, “capitalize on the win.”

“I had an idea,” Lauren told him. It was a bit awkward to have conversations at the big table, facing their books and paperworkand not each other. “I was thinking that Paula and I could switch places, and she could play Rizzo and I could be the propertymistress.”

“Paula quit,” Mr. Smith said.

“No, I know, but she could come back, couldn’t she?”

Mr. Smith continued marking papers like he hadn’t heard her, like their elbows weren’t touching.

“I think that would make her happy,” Lauren said. “And I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“No, I’m sure that’s an issue of utmost prominence in your life right now, Lauren—just how ecstatically happy you can makeyour good friend Paula,” Mr. Smith said. “You’d give it all up for her, wouldn’t you?”

“Paula is a good singer. I’ve heard her,” Lauren said.

Lauren hated Rizzo like she was a person. She had a dream that she was suspended from school after arguing with Rizzo in thecafeteria—Lauren shoved her across a table, sending Stitch’s brown-bag lunch spinning onto the linoleum, and Mr. Smith hadto intervene. In another dream Lauren surrendered Midnight to an animal shelter because Mirela wouldn’t stop pulling her tail,and when the door shut on the cage, Lauren realized that Midnight had Rizzo’s face.

Mr. Smith flicked his pen onto the table and rubbed his eyes. “You wear me out, Lauren,” he said. “You keep trying out formy plays and you keep trying to weasel out of them and it’s just a lot of drama for one Drama Club.”

Lauren hated Rizzo for her curdled crudeness, her spiteful pride in