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

to dinner, that is, assuming Mom had noticed whether or not Lauren came to dinnerand was not instead focused on the proven fact that Mirela had dumped her own dinner into a basket of freshly folded linens.

“Save it for later,” Mirela would say. One of her first sentences in English. That’s right, Mirela. There would always be a better time than now.

“Lauren,” Abby was saying. “Honey. What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

Lauren tried for what felt like a long time to respond, staring at the slice on the table as it succumbed to a yeasty rigormortis, the greasy edges of the paper plate starting to curl around it like a carnivorous flower, her lips opening and closingaround the thing she couldn’t say.

A voice was calling in the distance. They were needed onstage. Claire and Stitch got up from the couch but Abby stayed inher chair beside Lauren. Someone standing behind Abby asked her to come, or told her—a surprise and affront in the request—andstill Abby stayed. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap.

Abby never did things like this. She was orderly, rational. She didn’t keep other people waiting.

“Lauren,” Abby said. “Please. Tell me what is going on.”

Abby stayed there so long the light started to change. When she finally got up and left the room, with a parting squeeze ofLauren’s shoulder, Abby crossed in front of one of the halogen lamps and Lauren felt her friend’s shadow alight briefly onher skin and lift again, and she closed her eyes against this bleak triumph, that she had not only outlasted her friend, exhaustedher sympathy, but she had outlasted the whole day, she had starved and killed it, she had forced the earth to turn away fromthe sun. She didn’t feel happy, but she did feel like she’d won.

 

When she thinks back to that night, her skin ripples and hardens into scales, ticklish and tender. Moths and dragonflies beatingtheir wings inside her rib cage. Open her mouth and a wasp would fly out. She felt a queasy excitement, an exhilaration indestruction, to realize again the earthquake that swallows up and spits out your whole life could be ecstatic, could have ever been anything other than ecstatic. Like seeing the blood on the floor and realizing the blood was her. As if the four walls of the redbrick house had fallen down to reveal a theater-in-the-round, an audience in semi-darkness, and Lauren in her tight skirt and satin Pink Ladies windbreaker and hair that Abby had teased big with hot irons and hairspray, standing head-to-head with Stitch, in his painted-on jeans and black leather jacket and sparkling-wet swirly pompadour, and he snapped his next line through a big wad of gum—“Whaddya tryin’ to do, Rizzo?”—and she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say.

Stitch snapped his fingers. “Whaddya tryin’ to do, there, Rizzo?” he asked again.

She could only remember what she wasn’t supposed to say, so she said it.

“I feel like a broken typewriter,” she said.

Stitch’s mouth dropped open. He might have been startled, or letting himself in on Lauren’s joke, or preparing to speak hisnext line. Lauren would never know. Such was the charisma of Stitch.

“You know, like a broken typewriter—because I skipped a period,” Lauren said, enunciating, smacking the pee, eyes sliding meaningfully toward the audience, and then Stitch said something about Rizzo always flapping her gums and Andysaid his next line and Lauren felt herself altered, bewitched, the abracadabra of the forbidden line unlocking all her dialogueand marks and dance steps, which she could perform as if remote-controlled.

When she came offstage, she felt him before she could see him. Not physical touch but the weight and pressure of his bodyshifting the air near her. Grunting through gritted teeth. Then he grabbed her roughly by the arm, and she wanted to laughit felt so good.

“Lauren, how could you do this. How could you do this to me.”

Matter changing states in the wrong space. The person from the wood-paneled living room colliding with the person from school.Ardor then anger, anger substituted for ardor.

Andy stepping forward, his body poised to come between them, ready to launch into gangly action. Andy Figueroa, Lauren’s mind typed out, not so bad after all. Claire and Stitch round-eyed, staring, but not at Lauren.

Changing states into an animal. What kind? Barking, snarling, foaming. All instincts and reflexes and endocrine receptors.Nothing to argue with. She wasn’t an animal, and so she must have been the one who made him do it. She decided to. And shewas glad. When she smiled, she bared her teeth, too.

“Ted,” Andy was saying, “let go of her.”

“Let go of her!” everyone was shouting, and still Lauren bared her teeth.

 

The funny thing was that nobody in the audience seemed to have caught on. Even a few people in the play, like Brendan, hadno idea, although Brendan was an idiot. Mr. Smith left during curtain call, and after the players left the stage, some ofthem changing out of their costumes and storing them for the next night’s performance, none of them gathered in Tedquartersas they normally would. As if by mutual unspoken agreement, they filtered out down the hall from the auditorium toward thefront entryway, their parents and siblings gathering in the sunken cafeteria. The faces of their families were shining andunconflicted; their arms were open. Mrs. Figueroa scooped Andy off his feet and swung him around, and he looked so happy.They spoke to each other in Spanish. Qué maravilloso, qué estupendo.

“Vee yo so!” Mirela told Stitch, then wrapped her arms around Mrs. Kornbluth’s legs.

The families mingled in one loose embrace among the long tables with the chairs stacked atop them. The overhead fluorescentlights took on a fireside warmth.

Stitch in his pompadour moved beside Lauren, close enough that their arms were touching.

“If someone asks me,” Stitch mumbled, “what do you want me to say?”

“Nothing,” Lauren said.

“I’ll have to say something.”

“No, I mean there’s nothing I want you to say—say what you want.”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

Lauren laughed. “Too late. Probably.”

“I think it