Chapter 32: Late Saturday Afternoon

Dad opened the front door for us and made a big show of peering around – looking for the two mystery boys we were supposed to have with us. When he saw no sign of them, he told me to go into the living room and sit down for a talk. It wasn’t really a request and it was clear that the talk he had in mind wasn’t necessarily going to be pleasant.

Liz came with me – she didn’t have much choice because I had a firm grip on her hand – and we sat together on the couch. I was a bit unsure about what was about to happen. Dad might realize I was teasing him and accept the joke or he might get angry in which case I would have to sit there and let him lecture me. I’d thought it was funny at the time to mislead him but I’d started regretting it almost straight away.

My position on the couch put me right across the room from Mum’s painting. She hung on the wall glaring down at me. I felt a long way away from the little girl shown in the picture sitting under Mum’s protection and helping to hold Angie. The real Mum appeared in the doorway to the hallway and leant against the wall where she could watch proceedings. Dad had taken up a position in the center of the room and glared at me even more fiercely.

“You, young lady, had permission to go to the cinema with your friend Liz. You did not let us know in advance that you were going there with a couple of boys. Especially since we’ve never met, or heard of, the particular boys involved. If you had, there might have been a few more conditions placed on you going. I did not appreciate having you drop that piece of information into the conversation over the phone when it was too late to do anything about it.”

He scowled at the two of us. “As for the boys involved, I must say they’ve lost all credibility with me. They have failed to do what I told you to ask them to do. I wanted them to show up here so I could meet them. If they were even half-way decent sorts of people, they would be here.”

“But, Dad, they are here. This is Dougal,” I held up Dougal so Dad could see him. “ ... and that’s Sampson.” Liz took her cue from me and lifted up Sampson. “I never said they were boys, I only said their names.”

“You ... what... ?” Dad spluttered, looking back and forth from Dougal to Sampson to me to Liz and so on.

“I told you we were going with Dougal and Sampson. You assumed they were boys.”

“Aaargh!” Dad clutched at his head and garbled a few more words...

“I may have mentioned something about them being our dates for the afternoon.” I put on my best little-girl voice. “I’m sorry if I upset you, Daddy.”

He pointed a shaky finger at me – or maybe he was shaking his finger at me, I’m not sure – and said, “you, you...” before collapsing into his armchair and clutched his head again, this time muttering something about being too old for all of this. Then he sat there holding his head and rocking back and forwards like a ... well, like a crazy person, I guess.

Liz leant over to me and whispered in my ear, “I think your dad is broken.”

I nodded at her and looked back at him with concern.

Mum didn’t seem too worried. She was still leaning against the wall with what used to be her stone face on. I say used to be, because she seemed to be trying to hide a grin and not succeeding very well. Dan had appeared in the doorway with Angie on his back. He was watching us all carefully. Angie was also watching us from her place on Dan’s back with her thumb stuck firmly in her mouth.

Dad sat up a bit and looked at Mum. “Is it too late to send our girls back to where we got them from? I’m sure the packaging didn’t warn us that they would turn into teenagers.”

Mum shrugged. “I have a feeling that amongst all those papers we signed at the hospital that there was some clause about no-returns or trade-ins.”

“Perhaps I could kill them with a shovel and bury them in the bottom of the garden.”

“Not near my studio you won’t,” Mum replied.

I leant back to Liz so I could whisper, “He’s not too badly broken. He’s making jokes.”

“Those are jokes?” Liz whispered in reply. “He’s talking about getting rid of you.”

“Yeah! Sure! But he’s talking about killing me with a shovel. Dad’s an electrical engineer. If he really wanted to kill me, he’d probably connect my bedroom doorhandle up to some gizmo and electrocute me.”

Liz stared at me and quietly shook her head.

Dad hadn’t finished with his comments. “Maybe we could put them up for sale on ebay.”

“See? And I thought Dad was old fashioned.” I was still whispering to Liz. “He can be all modern and stuff. Being sold on ebay would be cool.”

Mum had gone over to where Dad was sitting and pulled his head into her stomach. Dad proceeded to hold onto her and pretend to cry into her stomach while Mum stroked his head and said, “There, there, dear. It’s only for another seven years. Then they won’t be teenagers anymore. After that we get three years of peace before Angie gets to be a teenager.”

That caused a new batch of pretend sobbing from Dad.

“Your whole family is weird. You know that, don’t you?” whispered Liz.

“Sure I do. But that’s why you like me. You like weird things.” I grinned at Liz.

“Very true!”

“The good news is that I’m not in trouble,” I whispered.

“How do you know for sure?”

“Dad’s making jokes and fooling around. He’s upset with me but not mad at me. If he were really mad, he wouldn’t be making jokes about getting rid of me.”

“That’s absolutely right!” snapped Dad. Whoops, I must have said that louder than I meant to.

“I am upset with you. You let me think you were out with boys and I was worrying all afternoon about you.”

“Dad, I was teasing you. You’re always teasing me and I’m supposed to laugh. But when I tease you it turns into a whole drama. I’m sorry you were worried, Dad, but get this. I’m becoming a teenager. Teenagers hang out with boys. It’s like it’s a rule or something. They go on dates, they kiss and they do all sorts of other stupid things. I fully intend to do all of that – well maybe I’ll try not to do too much of the stupid stuff – but I’ll probably do all the rest, so you’d better start getting used to it.”

“Hah!” said Dad. “I have a solution for that. I won’t let you be a teenager. I’m cancelling your birthday ... and the next five after that. You’ll have to stay twelve until it’s time for you to be twenty. It’s too late for your sister, she’s already turned into a teen but there’s still time to save you.” Dad’s eyes were twinkling. He was enjoying this far too much for someone who was supposed to be upset.

“Oh, okay. That’s fair!” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “Tara gets to be a normal teenager, just because she got there first. But I have to stay twelve for six years and then suddenly become twen ... nineteen! If you make me skip six birthdays, my next one would be my nineteenth, not my twentieth.”

Dad rolled his eyes at me and ignored my correction. “As for your sister, when I finish here I think I’ll go nail her into her room. She can stay in there until she’s twenty. What do you think, Louise?”

He looked at Mum and she looked thoughtful. “I suppose it would be alright. We’d have to cut a little hole in the door so we could push food in for her. Now the question is, what should we do with our little Bec for the next six or seven years.”

They both turned and looked at me. I recognized my cue. “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to make you worry. I was being silly and I got carried away.”

Dad nodded and smiled at me with genuine warmth. “You know what to do when you want to go out with boys, don’t you?” he asked in a gentle voice.

“Yes I do, Dad. I promise I’ll do the right thing.”

Dad sighed and looked at Liz, who had been sitting quietly through all of that. “So, how is our favorite daughter today? Did you have a good time at the movies?”

I glared at Dad. That was supposed to be Mum’s joke to call Liz her favorite daughter but now he was doing it too. Dad completely ignored my glare and kept looking at Liz.

“Yeah, it was great!” Liz replied.

“Here’s a piece of fatherly advice. When you get old enough to have kids, make sure they aren’t smarter than you. It only causes headaches.”

“Sure, Mr F. Make sure they aren’t too smart. Gotcha! Good advice. Um ... how do you do that by the way?”

Mum sighed. “I tried dropping mine on their heads a few times when they were little. It doesn’t seem to have worked though.”

Liz grinned cheekily. “It might not have made them stupid, but it sure explains a few other things.”

“Hey!” I exclaimed and pushed her away from me.

She rocked in her place on the couch and then pushed me back with a big grin on her face. That quickly degenerated into a tickle fight on the couch, accompanied by non-stop giggles.

Liz and I ended up lying together on the couch and holding each other in a loose hug. The tickling had stopped and the giggling was dying away. Suddenly I felt myself being lifted up high in the air (well, not really that high) and put down so that I was sitting properly on the couch. It was Dan, of course. Liz scrambled around until she was sitting upright just next to me.

Dan sat himself down on the coffee table (it’s solid wood and could probably hold up a horse) and I realized he had a serious expression on his face. I looked around and saw that Mum and Dad had left the room. Angie was sitting on the floor playing some sort of game with Lucy (the doll).

“Dad might’ve forgiven you but I’m not sure that I have. You should be glad that I didn’t know anything about this until we got home. I would’ve marched straight into that cinema and hauled you out of there.”

I stared at Dan in surprise. Why was he angry with me? He was supposed to be on my side. I could feel my eyes getting suddenly damp.

“Had you forgotten why Tara is in trouble today? Had you forgotten what she was up to last night? Mum and Dad are still trying to deal with that and the very next day you decide to pull a stunt like this.”

I was feeling as if the world had suddenly pulled itself away from underneath me and I was falling out of control. It had just been a little joke and now Dan was unloading all this on me.

“It’s not the same,” I managed to gasp. “I’m not like...” I stopped myself in time before I said I wasn’t like Tara. That would have been a terrible thing to say – even if it were true. “I’m not like that.”

Dan was staring straight at me and I felt incredibly uncomfortable. He knew what I’d been about to say. My nose started to feel runny and I knew I was going to have to sniff any second. Why was Dan being like this? I hated it.

“Maybe you’re not, but how is everyone supposed to trust you if you lie to Dad about what you’re doing?”

I sniffed and quickly used my hand to brush the water from my eyes.

“When you go out,” said Dan, “when there are boys around, I might drop by once in a while. Just to say hi! I want you to think about that. Anytime you’re out with a boy. If I was to turn up at that instant – and I might – would you be embarrassed for me to see what you were doing? If the answer would be yes, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.”

Dan turned his gaze onto Liz. “And that goes for you too. You seem to have been adopted into my family so that makes you my sister too. Don’t think I won’t be able to find either of you.” He tapped the side of his head. “I have a finely-tuned sixth sense for finding my little sisters – anytime, anywhere.”

He looked back and forth between the two of us and shook his head.

“Both of you are capable of standing up for yourselves, but I haven’t forgotten how persistent some teenage boys can be. I’m not saying this to make your life miserable. I’m saying this because I love both of you. I want you to have fun, but I want you to be safe and I want to make sure there are limits on what you do.”

Dan went quiet and looked carefully at us both. My eyes and nose were still leaking but it wasn’t so much for the same reason anymore. I don’t really know why I was still crying. I just was. Liz was staring at Dan like she was in a trance. She’d never experienced Dan in full big-brother mode before and since she doesn’t have her own brother it must have been a totally unique experience for her. When Dan turns it on, he can be ... I don’t know ... overwhelming.

“So! Do we have an understanding here?”

Liz and I both nodded together several times like those little bobbing dolls that go in the back of cars.

Dan stood up, then leant forward and kissed Liz on the cheek. Then he leant towards me to do the same to me, but I remembered in time and moved my head away. I mumbled “don’t touch me,” but it wasn’t very loud and I’m not sure if he heard me.

Dan looked at me a bit strangely then turned and left the room. I picked up Dougal from where he was lying abandoned on the floor beside the couch and clutched him to my chest.

Inside my brain, I remembered back through the day and decided I’d done a good job of avoiding Dan today. I’d even managed to stop myself from hugging him when he was in the Big Benny suit, though that had been very tempting.

Inside my head, a little version of me stood up in front of a crowd.

“Hi! My name is Bec and I’m a Danaholic.”

“Hi Bec!” answered the crowd in a dull monotone.

“It’s nearly two days since I’ve touched Dan...”

“Aaah!”

“ ... and it hurts!”

“BEC!”

I jumped and blinked the tears out of my eyes, looking around frantically. Liz was sitting beside me with her arm around my shoulders and there was a damp spot on her shoulder where my head had been resting. It wasn’t Liz who’d yelled though.

Tara stood in front of me with her hands on her hips.

“What?” I snapped at her, still unsettled by her yelling at me.

“I said ... Dad wants us out the front. Come on.”

I blinked up at Tara. She was wearing an old pair of loose-fitting beige cargo pants and an oversized olive-drab sweatshirt with “University of Life” in large, bright red lettering. The sweatshirt also looked a bit old, but I’d never seen any of that outfit before. It was so totally the opposite of what she normally wears.

“What are you wearing?”

Tara plucked at the sweatshirt. “Mum made me wear this. She said that since we have guests coming that I get to wear proper clothes instead of that bathrobe. She bought it all at a second-hand charity shop this afternoon. I found the receipt in the bag. This whole outfit cost her three dollars and fifty cents.”

I ran my eye up and down. “You look fine. It’s kind of trendy in that casual, laid-back sort of way. I wouldn’t mind wearing that myself.”

Tara rolled her eyes at me, but she didn’t try to argue.

I stood up and hugged Tara. “Let’s go out and see what Dad wants us for.”

I kept my arm firmly wrapped around Tara’s waist and she had hers around me. Since I had Dougal clutched into my side with the other arm, I didn’t have a spare hand for Liz. I looked at her and gestured with my head and she seemed happy to trail along after us with Sampson dangling from one hand. Glued together, side-by-side, we walked out the front door and down the drive.

Dad had brought a big cardboard box out of the garage and set it down on the nature-strip beside the road. It was the box that the new oven had arrived in earlier in the year. The old one had gone up into the sky to live in that place where all the different types of cookers go when they die.

Pretty well straight after we’d bought the oven, Dan had cut one of the sides out of the box and Angie had spent many happy hours playing in it. Now the box sat with the open side up and Dad stood beside it with a big permanent marker writing something in large letters on a square of cardboard.