The parents sipped their coffee. It made sucking noises.
“We have one room. For all of us. One single room!” intoned Terry. “For pity’s sake. Give us our blessed space. In that minuscule scrap of territory. Think of the attic as a reservation. Imagine you’re the white conquerors who brutally massacred our people. And we’re the Indians.”
“Native Americans,” said a mother.
“Insensitive metaphor,” said another. “Culturally.”
“ONE OF THE mothers has a clubfoot?” asked Jen. “Huh. I never noticed.”
“What is a clubfoot?” asked Low.
His name was actually Lorenzo, but that was too long, plus he was the tallest one of all of us, so we called him Low. Rafe had coined it. Low didn’t mind.
“It drags,” said Rafe. “That shoe with a thick heel. You know? That fat one’s Sukey’s mother, I bet.”
“Sure, sure. Is not,” said Sukey. “My mother’s way better than that shit. My mother could kick that mother’s ass.”
“It can’t be no one’s mother,” objected Low.
“Well. It could,” said Sukey.
“There are some single ones,” pointed out Juicy. He was called that because of his saliva, which was plentiful. He liked to spit.
“And childless couples,” said Jen. “Sadly, barren.”
“Destined to die without issue,” added Terry, who fancied himself a wordsmith. His real name was Something the Third. As if that wasn’t bad enough, “the Third” translated to “Tertius” in Latin. Then “Tertius” shortened to “Terry.” So obviously that was what they called him.
He kept a private journal in which his feelings were recorded, possibly. The possibility was widely mocked.
“Yeah, but I saw the fat one in the kitchen groping Sukey’s father,” said Rafe.
“Untrue,” said Sukey. “My father’s dead.”
“Been dead for years,” nodded Jen.
“And still dead now,” said David.
“Stepfather, then. Whatever,” said Rafe.
“They’re not married.”
“A technicality.”
“I saw them too,” said Low. “She had her hand right on his pants. The package. Right on there. Guy had a raging boner.”
“Gross,” said Juicy. He spat.
“Goddammit, Juice. You almost hit my toe,” said Low. “Demerit.”
“Your fault for wearing sandals,” said Juicy. “Mega lame. A demerit to you.”
We had a system of accounting, a chart on a wall. There were merits and demerits. A merit was for an outrage successfully committed, a demerit for an act that should bring on humiliation. Juicy got merits for drooling into cocktails undetected, while Low got demerits for kissing up to a father. Probably not his own—Low’s parentage was a well-kept secret. But he’d been spotted asking a guy with male-pattern baldness for wardrobe advice.
Low was a baby-faced giant of Mongolian descent, adopted from Kazakhstan. He was the worst dresser among us, rocking a seventies look that involved tie-dyed tank tops and short-shorts with white piping. Some made of terrycloth.
WE WOULDN’T HAVE been able to keep the parent game going if not for the parents’ near-total disinterest. They had a hands-off attitude. “Where’s Alycia?” I heard a mother say.
Alycia was the oldest of us, seventeen. And already a freshman in college.
“I’ve barely seen her since we got here,” went on the voice. “What is it, two weeks now?”
The mother was speaking from the breakfast room, out of my field of view. I liked that room a lot, with its long, oaken table and glass walls on three sides. You could see the bright sparkle of the lake through the glass walls, and sunlight shifted through the moving branches of an ancient willow that shaded the house.
But the room was teeming with parents every morning. We couldn’t use it.
I tried for a voice ID, but when I edged into the doorway the conversation had turned to other matters—war in the news, a friend’s tragic abortion.
Alycia had gone AWOL to the nearest town, hitching a ride from a yardman. The town was a gas station, a drugstore that was rarely open, and a dive bar, but she had a boyfriend there. Some decades older than she was.
We covered for her as well as we could. “Alycia’s in the shower,” announced Jen at the table, the night she left.
We checked the parents’ expressions, but no cigar. Poker faces.
David, the next night: “Alycia’s in her bunk with cramps.” Sukey, the third: “Sorry, Alycia’s not coming down. She’s in a pretty bad mood.”
“That girl needs to eat more,” said one woman, spearing a roasted potato. Was she the actual mother?
“She’s thin as a rail,” said a second.
“She doesn’t do that puking thing, does she?” asked a father. “With the vomit?”
Both women shook their heads. Puzzle unsolved.
“Maybe Alycia has two mothers,” said David afterward.
“Two mothers, possibly,” said Val, a tomboy who didn’t say much. Mostly she parroted.
Val was so small and slight it was impossible to tell her age. Unlike the rest of us, she was from somewhere in the country. She mostly liked to climb. High and nimbly—buildings or trees, it didn’t matter. Anything vertical.
“Kid’s like a goddamn monkey,” a father once said, watching her scale the willow.
A group of parents were drinking on the porch.
“A gibbon,” said another. “Or Barbary macaque.”
“White-headed capuchin,” offered a third guy.
“A pygmy marmoset.”
“Juvenile black snub-nosed.”
A mother got fed up. “A shut-your-face,” she said.
WE WERE STRICT with the parents: punitive measures were taken. Thievery, mockery, contamination of food and drink.
They didn’t notice. And we believed the punishments fit the crimes.
Although the worst of those crimes was hard to pin down and therefore hard to punish correctly—the very quality of their being. The essence of their personalities.
IN SOME ARENAS we had profound respect. We respected the house, for instance: a grand old fortress, our castle and our keep. Not its furnishings, though. Several of those we opted to destroy.
Whoever had the most merits, at the end of each week, got to choose the next target. What object would it be? Choice Number One: a china statuette of a rosy-cheeked boy in knee breeches, holding a basket of apples and smiling.
Choice Two: a pink-and-green sampler embroidered with a dandelion and, in a swirly script, the words Take a Breath Gently. Blow. Spread Your Dreams and Let Them Grow.
Choice Three: a plump duck decoy with a puffed-out chest and creepy blank eyes, sporting a weird painted-on tuxedo.
“It’s a fat faggot duck,” said Juice. “A bowtie duck. A faggot, like, crooner duck. A Frank Sinatra duck faggot.”
He giggled like a maniac.
Rafe, who was out and proud, told him to shut his trap, homophobe idiot.
The winner was Terry that week, and he chose the apple boy. He fetched a ball-peen hammer from the toolshed and smashed in its head.