Family Game Night and Other Catastrophes Read online

  I don’t get a chance to look around before a pair of velvet-soft arms seizes me. Grandma Nora hugs me tight. Over her shoulder I see Mom, and Leslie is standing nervously behind her. Mom’s face is blotchy and her eyes are wild. When we break apart, Grandma Nora’s airplane-and-bubble-gum smell clings to me. I’ll probably have to wash this shirt before I can wear it again.

  “You look like you just woke up,” Grandma Nora says. She reaches out to ruffle my bed head. One of Grandma Nora’s many silver and gold rings catches on a tangle in my hair. She gives a little tug, and I barely stop myself from yelping out loud as Grandma Nora frees a few hairs from my scalp. The pain makes the world swim into sharper focus, and I get a good look at Grandma Nora for the first time.

  “Hey, you cut your hair.” I think back to the last picture I saw of her. She and Aunt Jill were on a scenic overlook. The beach behind them was overrun with elephant seals. Grandma Nora called them “amazing creatures”—she sent me an entire email about it. But I just thought they looked disgusting, like giant, bristly slugs (the seals, not Grandma Nora and Aunt Jill). In that photo, Grandma Nora’s hair was soft and gray and poufy. Very grandmotherly. Now it’s short and sassy, nary a gray hair in sight.

  “And you dyed it,” I add, wishing that my mom rather than my grandma would have been the one to discover hair coloring.

  “Yes, I did,” Grandma Nora says, patting her hair. “Thank you for noticing.” She sends a stern look in my mom’s direction. A mental scolding. It seems Mom hasn’t yet commented on the new style. It’s hardly fair to blame Mom for this; she looks like she’s about to go into shock or pass out. “What do you think of it?” Grandma Nora asks me, still running her fingers through her hair, which is styled into these little reddish spikes all over her head.

  The truth is: I don’t like it. The top of her head looks like a cross between a troll doll and those little land mines on the computer game Minesweeper. It seems like something a teenage Goth-wannabe would try. I latch on to the teenage part of that thought train.

  “It makes you look young,” I say.

  Grandma Nora beams. “That’s just what the young man at the salon told me it would do. Well, we’ll have plenty of time to finish catching up later. Now where would you like me to put my bags?” She motions to the suitcases—that’s right, plural—suitcases at her feet. “I want to get settled in before we start.”

  I went fishing with Dad once. Once was enough for both of us. I’m not sure who was more traumatized: me, Dad, or the fish. But right now Mom looks exactly like the one fish we did manage to catch. I remember how it flopped around out of the water, gasping for breath. Its frowny little mouth was opening and closing and opening and closing. Just like Mom’s.

  Grandma Nora shakes her head. “This is even worse than I thought. Show me where to park my bags and we’ll get started.” She rubs her hands together.

  Started? She hasn’t sat down yet. She hasn’t asked if Mom wants her help. This is going to be just as bad as I thought, maybe worse. And I was expecting Armageddon.

  While I silently panic, my mother the codfish finds her voice. “I didn’t know you were coming.” Her voice is a few pitches higher than normal. “We’re not really ready for company.” Understatement of the year. “There’s a bed-and-breakfast in town. Let me call and see if they have any rooms.”

  “You don’t want me to stay with you?” Grandma Nora says, sounding too hurt to be believable.

  “It’s not that—” Mom says, wringing her hands like some tragic character in one of Dad’s favorite Shakespeare plays.

  “It’s been years since I visited,” Grandma Nora says. “I’ll be so much more help if I stay here.”

  Which, of course, is exactly what Mom does not want.

  Maybe if I’d been paying better attention, I would have predicted what happens next. I should have seen it coming. But I’m so involved in imagining different versions of the Balog Family Apocalypse that when Mom unwinds her hands and waves the white flag, her words catch me off guard. “If it’s important to you … ” Her voice fades away and she lifts her hands in a helpless gesture. “… I guess you’ll have to stay in Annabelle’s room.”

  Of course. Why didn’t I prepare for this? It’s worse than the apocalypse. Grandma Nora’s stuff, spreading out and taking over my clean white spaces. There will be no place to live in my own house. How can I do my ritual if Grandma Nora’s in there? I have to stop this. Have to, have to, have to. I try to think of a quick way to uninvite Grandma Nora, but I’m caught in a panic cycle and I’m too slow.

  “Perfect!” says Grandma Nora. “And where will Annabelle sleep?”

  No, no, no. Annabelle will sleep in her room. In her bed.

  “Annabelle can sleep in my room,” Leslie pipes up. I want to squash my sister, squash her like she’s Jiminy Cricket.

  “Wonderful!” says Grandma Nora, and she turns to face me. “Believe me. You do not want me for a roommate. Grandpa George used to say I snore like a grizzly. Well, that’s all set.” She’s smiling, clearly thrilled to have so neatly evicted me from my own room. That done, she angles herself toward the top of the stairs and starts shouting for Chad. If her shouting is anything to go by, then I totally believe that she snores like a grizzly. She’s deafening. “CHAD,” she yells. “Where are you? Come down, dearest, and greet your grandmother.”

  There’s no reply.

  Grandma Nora turns to my mom. “Is he here?”

  “I—I think so,” Mom says, still looking bemused.

  “Yeah, he’s here,” I say. It’s about time he got dragged into the chaos.

  “CHAD! CHAD! I know you’re up there!” Between shouts, Grandma Nora starts addressing me, Mom, and Leslie. “Where is that boy? He needs to get his tushy down here and make himself useful. I’m not about to lug all this upstairs by myself. My hair may make me look twenty years younger, but that doesn’t mean my back is any stronger—CHAD! CHAD!” She interrupts herself to yell some more. “WE KNOW YOU’RE UP THERE!” She turns back toward us. “And I have a fun idea. Once we get my bags upstairs, what do you girls say we go into town and grab some dinner? My treat. We can go over some of my ideas for how to fix up this place.”

  “Let’s eat at Marcini’s!” says Leslie, naming Dad’s favorite restaurant. We tend to go there without Mom in times of trouble, and I can never decide if it’s because Dad thinks of Italian food as comfort food or if it’s because it makes Dad feel closer to Sherlock—he’s forever telling us that there’s a Marcini’s mentioned at the end of his favorite Holmes novel.

  Grandma Nora’s eyes skirt around the room again. You never really get used to drowning in your own garbage, but it does kind of lose some of its shock value after a while. Really, it’s amazing what people can get used to. So even though the house looks awful but normal to me, I can only imagine how bad it looks to Grandma Nora, and how much worse it would look to people from school. Grandma Nora opens her mouth as if she’s about to continue her monologue, but Mom, who still seems to be experiencing symptoms of shock, suddenly speaks again.

  “No!”

  “Why shouldn’t we go into town?” Grandma Nora asks her.

  Panic flashes across Mom’s face, and I wonder if she’ll turn all blotchy and silent and fishlike again, but she doesn’t. Instead, she stammers a bit and then spits out an excuse. It’s totally lame and completely obvious that Mom is lying through her teeth.

  “We—we—we can’t plan to ‘fix it up.’ I don’t want to—to— It’s, um, we’re having … I promised the kids a Family Game Night!”

  It’s a good thing we don’t go camping anymore. If a grizzly wandered into our site, Mom would probably shove me into its open arms while she made her getaway.

  It wasn’t always like that. We used to have roaring fires and s’mores. I even remember Mom holding me on her lap while Dad told stories about Hamlet’s father’s ghost and Macbeth’s murdered king. But things change. They get worse. And I try not to remember the better t
imes. It only makes me upset. It’s easier to accept the way things are if you don’t remember the way they used to be.

  “Family Game Night? Sounds great!” says Grandma Nora. She has the look of a tiger waiting to pounce, but for the moment, I guess Grandma Nora has decided to humor Mom.

  Announcement: The apocalypse has been temporarily postponed.

  “Let’s order pizza,” Grandma Nora says.

  “Ooh, can we get pineapple on it?” Leslie asks. She hasn’t stopped smiling since she volunteered to share her room with me. And now, with the mention of a Family Game Night, Leslie looks as if her wildest dreams have come true. Heaven help us all. She must think that Grandma Nora’s visit is off to a great start.

  “Fine,” says Mom. “I’ll take care of it.” She shuffles off to the kitchen as fast as her bad knees will carry her.

  I repress a sigh. I hate when we do this. It’s not the first time Mom has tried these tactics. Maybe if we ignore the problem, it will go away. Maybe if we pretend to be a normal family, we’ll become one. She always wants to put on the one-big-happy-family horse-and-pony show in front of other people. Sometimes it even seems like it’s working. But the next day, our kitchen is still full of newspapers and Dad goes back to wearing a deerstalker cap and Mom still hasn’t started painting again, and everyone is more miserable than they were before.

  Grandma Nora shouts up the stairs some more. “Where is that brother of yours? CHAD! CHAD! CHAD!” She’s so loud I am half-worried that she’ll cause an avalanche. I can picture the hallway junk mail sliding down the stairs and burying us all under Valpak coupons and Pier 1 catalogues. I shake my head to clear it—Leslie’s File o’ Death must be getting to me if I’ve started worrying about indoor avalanches. Or, maybe, it was seeing the newspapers clobber Leslie that got me worrying.

  “CHAD, GET YOUR TEENAGE BUTT DOWN HERE. SO HELP ME IF I HAVE TO COME FIND YOU!”

  Or so help Chad, I mentally correct her.

  A door squeaks and Chad finally appears at the top of the stairs. He’s rubbing his eyes, and his brown hair is sticking out in a hundred different directions. Actually, if his hair was red and just a little bit neater, he and Grandma Nora would have the same hairdo.

  “Wh-who’s making all the noise?” he asks. His voice is thick with sleep.

  “I AM!” Grandma Nora booms. “Now will someone explain to me why everyone here thinks they can sleep till five in the afternoon on a Sunday? Did any of you even go to church this morning?”

  Huh? What decade is Grandma Nora living in? Guess no one told her that we haven’t gone to church in years and years. Not since the newspapers and Beanie Babies started piling up.

  “What?” asks Chad, squinting down the stairs. He’s leaning a bit to the left, his muscles tense like he’s about to bolt.

  “Grandma’s here!” I try to sound happy, but I just sound fake. Sarcastic.

  Grandma Nora notices. She stops yelling at Chad and twists her head around, like some sort of demented owl, to glare at me.

  “And guess what? Guess what?” Leslie calls up to Chad. Grandma Nora doesn’t glare at Leslie. There’s no doubting that Leslie’s excitement is genuine: She’s bouncing on the balls of her feet and clapping her hands. She looks like a cheerleader. She probably will be one someday. There are times when I wonder how we’re related. “Guess what, Chad? We’re having a Family Game Night with Grandma Nora, and there’s gonna be pineapple pizza and everything. Mom said so. Isn’t that cool?”

  Sure, Leslie. Sure. What could go wrong?

  I retreat to the backyard. There’s a wooden swing that hangs from the tree outside my bedroom window. Dad put it there, once upon a time when we were happy. It’s the same cottonwood that the plaid boxers got stuck in when I threw my room out the window.

  I don’t really have anywhere else to go, not with Grandma Nora moving into my room. And I can’t hide in Leslie’s room—I refuse to set foot in the Toy Catacombs a second before I have to.

  As usual, I have my phone with me for company. I scroll through the texts from Rae, Melanie, Jenny, Amanda, and Drew, trying to distract myself from the thought of Grandma Nora cluttering up my room with foot creams and hand lotions.

  When she followed Chad upstairs, I called out after her: “How long are you staying?”

  “As long as it takes,” Grandma Nora called back.

  Not good.

  “But when’s your flight home?”

  “Haven’t bought the ticket yet.”

  Not good at all.

  No wonder she brought more than one suitcase. I keep telling myself that Grandma Nora isn’t Mom; Grandma Nora doesn’t have any trouble throwing things out, but the anxiety continues to mount as I picture eyeglasses and heating pads and old magazines and woolen socks clogging up my space. There’s someone in my room, touching my stuff, moving around my things.

  Who knows what I’ll be cleaning out of there once she leaves? If she ever leaves. Amanda’s grandma “came for a visit” when we were in second grade, and she still hasn’t left. And what if Mom sneaks things into my room while Grandma Nora’s here? How can I check on it when Grandma Nora is living in it?

  I trace patterns in the dirt under my swing with my foot. Circles and half circles. My phone buzzes, and when I check who’s texting me, my heart gives a little pitter-patter. It’s Drew.

  Did you get your beauty rest after the party?

  I can feel myself smiling. I text back:

  What’s your prob? Did you think I needed it?

  I hit send before I realize that my answer might sound a little harsh. I was aiming for flirty. Rae tells me that sometimes when I’m trying to flirt I just sound mean. She can be pretty judgmental; still, she’s right a lot of the time about stuff like that. But let’s face it: If one bad text scares Drew off, then we’re hopeless. My life (by which I mean my family) is not for the faint of heart.

  I wait for his reply, twisting the swing in circles and then whirling around while the ropes unwind. I start going too fast, and my phone flies into the dirt just as it buzzes again. I scramble for it, relieved that no one is here to see what a dork I am. Drew has sent another text. I’m sitting in the dust, with the wooden swing bumping against the back of my head, but I’m happier than I’ve been all day. Drew didn’t misread my text.

  He’s written back: “Yeah, you looked like an ogre. Better go to bed early tonite.”

  We go back and forth for a while. I call him a troll and a gargoyle. He calls me a harpy and a fossil. I guess he ran out of mythical creatures. He should probably pay better attention in school. Then my happy little bubble disappears.

  Drew writes: “You live off Rainbow Rd, right? My cousin moved out that way. I’ll stop by next time I visit him. Maybe Weds?”

  No. Nonononononono. I have my Five-Mile-Radius Rule for a reason. It hasn’t been easy, but the last time I had guests over was my tenth birthday, and I plan to keep it that way. I don’t want anyone at school to know what our house is like. I don’t want them to know that my mom is crazy. I’ll get made fun of. Or, worse, people will feel sorry for me.

  And then, worser and worser, there’s always this quiet, niggling doubt in the back of my mind. We’re talking Worst Case Scenario. I don’t even like to think about it. But there’s this little part of me that worries if the people at school found out, they wouldn’t just judge me. They would try to help. Someone would call Child Protective Services. A teacher. Or a “friend.” I’ve seen it on the news: kids who get put in foster care because their homes are too disgusting for them to live in anymore. I don’t think our house is bad enough for CPS to take me and Leslie and Chad away, but I don’t want to test that little theory. I don’t want our family to split up.

  So I try to think of a quick excuse, a reason to keep Drew away. I don’t really want to lie to him, even though I have lied to people before about why they can’t come over (everything from our septic tank exploded to there’s a hantavirus outbreak).

  But, for some reason
, I want to be honest with Drew. Or, maybe, it’s just that all my usual excuses are kind of gross. I mean, exploding septic tanks and rodent pee diseases are not the sort of things you want a cute boy to associate with you.

  “Not the best time,” I text. “My grandma’s in town. She just got here.”

  “Cool!” he writes. “I’d love to meet her.”

  Suddenly Grandma’s stuff cluttering up my bedroom doesn’t seem so terrible. Everything is a little brighter. I’m feeling … optimistic. Leslie-like. It’s a strange, unusual feeling. I notice how green the cottonwood and aspen leaves are and how yellow the dandelions in the grass seem. All because a cute boy said he wants to meet my grandma.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to let him come over. The Five-Mile-Radius Rule remains firmly in place, but a teenage boy does not ask to meet your grandma unless he likes you. I mean, I knew Drew liked me before, but now I know just how much.

  And then, let’s face it, because I’m no optimist, I’m no Leslie, and the universe doesn’t want me to be happy for too long, catastrophe strikes.

  “Time for Family Game Night,” my mom shouts from the side door.

  She’s changed into her mint-green muumuu. Beware the pastels.

  Family Game Night is a five-act Elizabethan tragedy. See, unlike Melanie and Rae and, apparently, Drew (we had a whole unit on allusion and creatures of mythology in literature), some of us hung on Ms. Leary’s every word. I love English class. Actually, I love school. It’s so neat and clean and calm and organized there. That’s another secret. It doesn’t help with the whole blending-in thing to like teachers or school too much.

  But when everyone else was saying that class was boring, I was scribbling down Ms. Leary’s every word about plots and pyramids and some guy named Freytag.

  (I think that has a nice Shakespeare-ish ring to it, don’t you?)

  Dramatis Personae

  GRANDMA NORA: meddlesome grandmother

  MINT-GREEN-MUUMUU MOM: an emotionally fragile woman