Forgotten Roses

Chapter 5--Trapped

When I got home at six-thirty, I knew that Mom would be home any minute, so I hurriedly began throwing together something for dinner.She walked in the door three minutes later, as I was pouring boiling water into the Cup-of-Noodles. When she saw what I was doing, she laughed.

“Now that’s healthy,” she said.

“Yeah, seems like we never have real dinner around here anymore, doesn’t it?” I said, searching through the flatware drawer for chopsticks.

She sighed. “We’re both busy.”

“And we both need a vacation,” I added. She smiled.

There wasn’t anything to clean up after we’d finished, so I grabbed my purse and headed upstairs, hoping, to force my way through another chapter of the terrible romance novel.

“Lizzie?” Mom asked, stopping me halfway us the stairs. I turned, not liking the tone in her voice.

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking…” she began. “Well…”

“What, Mom?” I got the feeling that she’d been observing my life again, and decided to fix it herself.

“I was thinking about that Meenah girl, and how she doesn’t have an exchange family to stay with, and I asked the school what we’d have to do if we wanted to kind of adopt her for the rest of the year, and--”

“You didn’t,” I nearly screamed, horrified. “Are you trying to ruin my life?”

“Really, Lizzie,” she scolded. “I think that you could benefit from--”

“Mom, I have to say that I thought I’d heard all of your bad ideas, but this one is by far the top of the list. I know, let’s just adopt this creepy Canadian girl like a stray puppy. Nice, mom.”

I didn’t want to mention my other thought: What if Brian’s crazy ideas were right? What if this girl was a vampire? Having her living in the same house most definitely would not be a good idea. How much danger would that put us in?

“It’s not official yet, Liz,” Mom said hurriedly. She could feel the full-scale teenager tantrum that was building. “I just wanted to know what you thought of the idea.”

And, just then, I thought of something else, Brain’s questionnaire, his irritated look when I didn’t know an answer. And I hadn’t known a lot of answers. We didn’t know anything about this girls, so I shouldn’t give my irrational fear of her a deciding vote. And hadn’t Brian told me to find a way to fill in the unknown questions?

Crazy, my mind told me. Stupid. Sure, invite the vampire to live with you, so that you can prove that she is a vampire. Good idea, Lizzie.

“Uh, mom,” I said slowly, “That’s kind of a big thing to just spring on me. ‘Oh, by the way, Lizzie, do you want a sister?’ I’ve got to think about it.” Usually, if I could delay my answer long enough, she’d just forget about it.

“All right, tell me what you think tomorrow.”

And there went that plan.

Sighing dramatically, I ran into my room, threw myself dramatically onto my bed, and stared at the ceiling for a second. There was a surprised squeak from somewhere near my window. I looked over in shock, though I wasn’t as surprised as I should have been when I saw Meenah sitting on my desk, staring absentmindedly out the open window.

“What the--” I began furiously.

“--hell am I doing in your room?” she finished brightly.

I sighed, trying to calm myself down enough to remember what Brian had told me to find out about her. “Yeah, that.”

She was talking in that excited tone, the same one she’d used in my nightmare. Whatever her explanation was, I doubted that it would make sense. Little of what she said made sense.

“Um, actually, I didn’t come up with a good cover story, and I’m most certainly am not going to tell you my real reason, so--”

“Wait!” I interrupted, the anger I‘d been trying to keep back bursting through. “You come into my house, uninvited, come into my room and do something that you’re not telling me, and then you don’t even put in the effort to come up with a cover story? Coming in here is like breaking and entering or something, and whatever it is, it isn’t legal. Get out. Get out of my room, get out of my house, and get out of my life!”

She smiled. I was screaming furiously at her, and she just smiled and said, “Fine then, I’m leaving.” She didn’t sound disappointed. In fact, she sounded almost happy. I took a deep breath to calm myself and resumed my staring at the ceiling.

This had determined it, I decided. There was no way that this girl was going to stay here, no matter what Mom said.

“So, Lizzie, I was wondering if you’d though at all about the exch--”

“Not a good idea, mom. I’m 17. I kind of need my privacy.”

“Lizzie,” she said, glaring at me.

Oh. It was that kind of discussion. The “I’m going to do whatever I want, but I’m going to act like what you think matters so I‘ll pretend to ask you” kind of discussion.

“Lizzie, you need to think of others and--”

“No, Mom,” I yelled. “don’ try to turn me into the bad guy here. No matter what I say, you’re going to do it anyway, so why even bother asking me? If you‘re going to do it, cut out the pretenses of caring what I think and do it already!”

As I stormed out the door, I thought that she was smiling as if she knew she’d won. It wasn’t until I pulled out into the parking lot that I realized that I’d started arguing Mom’s side of the argument.

Damn, she was good.

“Lizzie?” I looked up, my arms full of books.

“Oh, Brian.” I was still too miffed to be friendly, so I settled for being minimally polite and civil.

“So, how’s your book going?” he gestured to Until Death do We Part, sitting on the top of my armload of textbooks.

“Uugh, don’t ask. How’s yours going?”

“Um, Mitzi found out that he was a vampire when he saved her from a car that had stalled on the railroad tracks and a train was coming. What about yours?”

“Tina was nearly hit by a bus.”

“So now what?” he asked.

“Uh, why don’t you go stand in front of a bus and see if anyone saves you?” I snapped.

“You in a bad mood today, Liz?”

“It’s just PMS.”

He turned beet red and muttered something about having to get to his Advanced Geometry class, then hurried off.

“Trezme! Put the book away!”

“Sure thing, Mr. Lewis.” I sighed, moved my book under the desk, and resumed reading. Even a poorly-written, half-thought romance novel was better than hearing the rest of the class discuss the significance of the broth in the political cartoon we were looking at. I actually spent most of my classes reading. I knew that I would regret this when I had no idea how tell the difference between our polar coordinate graphs, but I really wanted to read more about Tina and Fredrick’s complicated relationship, made much more difficult by Fredrick’s mother.

When I got home, after I finished my homework, I started making dinner, pulling out some of my favorite foods. When I had a few minutes to wait for the noodles to finish cooking, I sighed, leafing through the phone book absently. Before I realized it, I was staring at one entry, one person who could possibly dislike my mother’s idea as much as I did.

“Carol Stanley,” she answered the phone in a businesslike, no-nonsense tone.

“Hello, Ms. Stanley. I’m looking for Meenah. Is she there?”

“Who--”

The doorbell rang, and someone yelled, “Lizzie?”

“Never mind, here she is.” I hung up the phone quickly and hurried to answer the door.

“What?” I demanded. “You couldn’t just use the window this time?” I demanded.

“No,” she said just as bitterly. “I couldn’t. What have you done?”

“Don’t blame me,” I said hurriedly, still holding the door “I had nothing to do with this.”

“Your mother,” she spat the word, “has had the worst idea in the history of the Greater Rose County!”

“Good!” I yelled back. “Glad someone agrees with me!”

“Well then make her change her mind!”

“Don’t you think I tried?”

“Clearly you didn’t try hard enough!” she screamed.

I didn’t’ have a good reply, so I just slammed the door in her face.

I fumed back to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The doorbell rang again.

“Stupid, persistent, Canadian vampire,” I muttered under my breath as I stormed to get the door. The crazy girl was never going to give up.

“What?” I yelled, pulling the door open. I stopped quickly when I saw who it was.

“I locked my keys in my car, sorry. You still mad about the exchange girl?”

“Sorry, Mom.” I tried not to sound sorry. She was right. I was still mad.

“What’s up?” she asked as I hurriedly drained the spaghetti noodles and poured cheese sauce over them.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You made spaghetti and cheese. You only do that when you’re really upset about something.” Damn. That woman was far too observant.

“What,” I said defensively, “I can’t make mac and cheese with spaghetti noodles without it being a huge ordeal?”

“You used cheddar cheese.” She raised an eyebrow skeptically. Again, damn. Cheddar cheese was one of my favorite comfort foods, the product of a sugar free childhood.

“Okay, I’m mad,” I said, flinging the platter of spaghetti onto the table with a little more force than necessary. Thankfully nothing spilled or broke, but it did make a satisfyingly loud clatter.

Mom, totally unfazed, just served herself and began twisting the noodles casually around her fork.

“So what’s the problem? Is it a boy?” she asked, before taking a bite. I sighed. Of course, of course, she would assume that it was something like that.“Or a lack of a boy?” she added, misinterpreting my sigh.

“Mom,” I said slowly, piling a mountian of noodles on my plate, “the only guy I deal with on a regular basis is Chris, and he’s gayer than a daisy in spring. It’s not--” I stabbed my fork into the noodle mountain---”boy trouble.”

“Then what?” she asked, watching me shovel pasta into my mouth at an alarming pace. “what?”

With great effort, I swallowed. “I told you, it’s nothing.”

“That,” she pointed to the rapidly shrinking plate of spaghetti and cheese with her fork, “Is not nothing. So it’s something. Is it having to share a room?”

“What?” I squeaked through a full mouth. Mom looked confused. I swallowed and repeated myself.

“Did I forget to mention that?” she asked, a little too innocently. “It won’t be a problem, will it?”

“You know what, Mom? Believe it or not, my problem has nothing to do with boys, No boys, having a new roommate,” or that the roommate might be a vampire, I added mentally. “It’s how you’re always in my life, mom. You watch and criticize everything that I do, and when I don’t take your advice, you go and change it for yourself. Why can’t you, just once, let me make my own mistakes and fix my own problems and live my own life! My high school years don’t have to be exactly like yours.”

Before she could reply to my little rant, I grabbed my plate--which was still half-full--and stormed up to my room, which was--thankfully--empty. I carefully wedged my desk chair under the door, sat on the floor, and fumed over everything I’d said, everything I should have said, my mom, my life, and the fact that I had no salt. The spaghetti and cheese really needed it.

The next morning, I woke to the smell of muffins. I sighed, replaced my pajamas with jeans and a t-shirt, and grabbed last night’s dinner plate from the floor. I headed downstairs, not sure if I’d like what I found.

Mom was pulling a tray of blueberry muffins out of the oven.

“You made muffins?” I asked skeptically.

“Me?” she laughed, much too cheerful. “no, the good people at Rainbow Mart made these. “

“Who died?” I asked.

“Nobody died, Liz. Everything’s fine.”

“The last time that you made muffins for breakfast was when Mr. Kitty died,” I accused, naming our long-lost family pet.

“I didn’t make these,” she insisted.

I grabbed one of the muffins and pointed to it accusingly. “Then why are there muffins in our house?” I repeated.

“Well, it’s like I always say, a day without a muffin is not much of a day.”

“I’ve never heard you say that before. So who died?”

She sighed. “No one died, Liz. It’s just that, well, I was thinking about what you said last night--”

“Guilt muffins,” I interrupted.

“And I decided that you’re right--”

“Apology muffins,” I corrected my earlier assumption.

“Will you just let me finish? Anyway, you’re right, and we shouldn’t have her stay here if you’re really opposed to it--”

“What?” I squeaked. Once Mom decided that she was going to change my life, there was no stopping her.

‘You aren’t letting me finish. Anyway, if you don’t want her to stay I shouldn’t make you, but--”

“Oh, here’s the but.”

“Butt I got a call from the coordinator and it’s all finalized and--”

“Oh.” Oh. They were I know you’re going to be mad, but maybe if I give you muffins you’ll be happy about the whole situation muffins.

“So, um, when is she moving in?” I asked reluctantly.

“Saturday.”

I gasped. “That soon? How did they finalize it all so quickly?” She opened her mouth to speak, so I added, “Don’t tell me. I’d rather not know. So, where’s she going to sleep? My room’s only got one bed.”

She looked uncomfortable. I sighed. Like many things in my life, this would not end well. I grabbed a muffin and stormed out the front door.

“Fill in the blanks in these sections from the chapter. You can use your book.”

Erin rolled her eyes. “This isn’t going to help us study at all.”

“Let’s see if we can finish fast, and then we’ll use our flash cards and quiz each other.” I suggested.

We tried to fill in the right answers. Really, we did. But after realizing that all Lewis had done was type sections straight out of the chapter and replace random words with blanks, we began spicing it up a little.

“Noun.”

“Um, zebra. Now what?’

Erin turned to the beginning of the section and started reading, stressing the blanks ridiculously. “Communism is a system of equations where the individual is wrong and the state is pop tarts. Abraham Lincoln, in an effort to take over sparkling China, left in 1776 with his army of zebras.”

I laughed. Lewis glared at me for a second, then sighed and ignored us.

Mom had taken Thursday off work to “finalize the arrangements,” as she put it. I wasn’t sure what she’d meant by that until I got home from school and went up to my room.

The short space between my dresser and my desk had been changed. The poster of butterflies and the whiteboard calendar had been moved to a space of wall near my door, to make room for the camp bed that now occupied the space. I had to choke back a laugh.

“Camp bed?” I shouted downstairs at Mom, starting to laugh despite my efforts. “You expect her to stay in a camp bed?”

“Um…” she shouted back. The truth in that one syllable hit me with the force of a bus.

“Oh, Mom, no.” I screamed back, a little note of hysteria creeping into my voice, storming downstairs. “First, you expect me to share my house, my room with a complete stranger, and now this?”

Mom, who was obsessively cleaning the living room windows, glared at me. “You have fought tooth and nail against everything I’m doing for you. I’m trying to help you.”

“You’ve fought so hard for this that you aren’t noticing that it’s a really bad idea. Help me? Help me? What exactly is this going to do for me? Why do you have to be involved in every minute detail of my life?”

She pointed the bottle of window cleaner at me in a rather threatening gesture. “You are the most rebellious, ungrate--”

“You are so controlling! Everything always has to go your way.”

“You’re--” she paused, as if trying to think of a good reply.

Excellent, I thought. I win.

“--grounded!” she yelled.

Wow. Sure as hell hadn’t seen that one coming.

My last Friday. My last Friday when I would be the only teenager living in this house. My last Friday, for a year, when I would have my own room.

And I was spending it like this.

“This,” was my room, or my half of it. I was sitting on my new bed, if you could call it that. I’d moved it, wedged it into the little crevice between my closet--where it would be stored during the day--and my desk, sunlight streaming through the window lighting the bare space where my computer usually sat, an eye-smarting reminded of my punishment.

I’m always thought that my long, narrow room resembled the headquarters of an ecvil world dictator, but sitting from this angle, I realized that this was not where Josef Stalin IV would plan his takeover of Newfoundland. My room was a lair, a cave, the home of some creature of the night.

I got up, the cot creaking in protest, and started pacing across my room. At least that was something to do. I’d truly been struck speechless when Mom grounded me. We were usually a team, the single mother and teenage daughter, agreeing on almost everything. Despite our disagreements, we usually got along as a pair, equals, and I’d kind of forgotten that she could punish me for arguing with her.

Had I really been wrong? I didn’t think so. Maybe Mom was just blinded by Meenah’s human act.

I sighed and sat back down on my tiny bed. It groaned in protest before the bottom section collapsed, sending me crashing to the floor.

I stayed on the floor, staring up at the ceiling for a few minutes. Stupid Canadian vampire, I thought to myself. If she’d never come here, I wouldn’t be sitting on the floor, stuck here. Stupid Canadian vampire.

Canadian vampire. I’d laughed at Brian when he’d said that, and now there was no doubt in my mind. I believed him.

A lot can change in a few weeks.

Not moving from the floor, I reached out onto the half-collapsed bed, grabbed Until Undeath do we Part, and flipped to my bookmark. I was so close to the end, and I didn’t want to finish it and have nothing to read for the rest of the weekend. Getting another book from Brian was out of the question. Until my punishment was up, I wasn’t leaving this room.

There was a tap at my window, but I ignored it. Tina was about to have to explain to her new mother-in-law that Tina wanted to join Fredrick in undeath, and the mother wasn’t going to take it well.

After a few pages, there was another tap. I sighed. Stupid, impatient Canadian vampire. I pretended that I hadn’t heard and kept reading.

I turned the page, and saw with dismay that there was only one sentence on this page, the last of the book. Tina took a deep breath to steady herself and opened her mouth to speak.

“That’s it?” I screamed into the empty room. “The book ends here?” The remaining 20 pages were advertisements. I hurriedly turned through them, my frustration growing with each page.

At the end, on the very last page, were three lines of possible comfort.

The Love story continues in:

My Mother-in-Law is a Vampire

Available now!

I sighed. I’d have to stop by Emily’s Used Books or Book World and buy it. Another sigh. Yeah, fat chance of Mom letting that happen.

There was another impatient tap at my window.

Angrily, I slammed the book down and threw the window open.

“Listen, Meenah!” I yelled, not looking. “Unless you have a copy of My Mother-in-Law is a Vampire, go away. I really don’t want to deal with anything weird and confusing right now.”

A small rock flew over my head and landed on the floor with a clatter. I looked at it, confused, then looked outside.

“Took you long enough,” he yelled up. Brian was standing under my window, a handful of rocks in one hand. In the other…

“Thought you might want this,” he continued, pulling a paperback book out of a lastic bag.

“Brian, you’re a lifesaver.”

“You owe me.”

I laughed as a sudden though occurred to me. ‘How’re you going to get it up here?”

He paused, considering. “Um..” Suddenly, his face brightened. “Back away from the window!” he yelled, stuffing it back into the plastic bag.

“You break the window,” I muttered, hastily stepping backwards, “well, I’m not paying for it.”

The book sailed through it easily, though, landing with a soft thwump on my floor. I picked it up, unwrapped it, and quickly scanned the back cover.

“You’re a lifesaver, Brian!” I repeated, running back to the window. He smiled, turned, and ran back to his car. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw him blush at the compliment.