Grows That Way Page 8

  “Do you have anything other than anecdotal evidence? Any scientific controlled studies?”

  Oh boy. This is going to be a bad one. I finish the last of my spaghetti, and push my chair back from the table. “May I be excused?” I say. “I don’t have room for dessert anyway. That was excellent, Mom.” I rub my stomach appreciatively, and make it bulge as though it’s really full. “I’ll ride my bike to Logan’s.”

  “I think not,” Mom tells me, then turns back to Dad. “Logan is a boy. He lives on Alder Street. His dad is a government wildlife biologist and his mom is a teacher over at Southview Elementary. He has an older brother named Franco who has had some brushes with the law but I was unable to access the necessary records, so I’ll be advising Sylvie to take some caution around him in the interim.”

  I stare at my mom. I can’t believe it. I feel like my own privacy has been invaded. I also can’t believe she hasn’t made the connection with the Franco her niece is dating, unless this is something she and Auntie Sally never talk about, which would be strange. “You Googled them,” I say.

  Mom shrugs. “I used the reverse phone directory and did some online research, which is exactly what any responsible parent would do.”

  “What?” say Dad and I together.

  Mom pats her lips with her napkin, then pushes back her chair. “I’ll give you a lift, Honey, it’s too dark to be riding your bike.”

  I manage not to talk to her all the way over. She knows exactly where she’s going anyway because she’s entered their address in the car’s GPS. She tells me she’ll pick me up in an hour. I try to slam the car door, but don’t have the muscle for it of course, which only makes me more angry.

  chapter

  fifteen

  Mom waits in the car while I ring the doorbell. I’m hoping that Franco will answer the door to give her a good scare, but Logan swings it open. Mom beeps the horn twice then drives away.

  Logan stops me in the entranceway and studies my face. “What’s the matter?” he says.

  “My parents,” I say.

  “You told them?”

  “Are you kidding? It was enough of an event to say I wanted to go to a boy’s house after dinner. Anything more and the universe would have imploded.”

  Logan seems uncertain.

  “I’ll tell them later,” I say, “after I’ve talked to your dad.”

  Logan leads me down a long hall and only then do I start worrying about what it’s going to be like to meet his family and what they’re going to think of me. I probably should have changed, but everything at home was running late, so I’m still wearing my riding pants with the suede patches on the inside of the knees. The pants taper at my ankles and fit inside my Ariat Junior Performer paddock boots, which of course have their patented self-cleaning treads so at least I don’t have to worry about tracking horse manure through the Losinos’ house. Plus I have serious hat hair from wearing my riding helmet. I run my fingers through it, trying to fluff it up and create some volume. Logan catches me. “You look fine,” he says.

  “I do?” I snort, then I say, “I don’t think I ever look fine.”

  “You look like you,” says Logan, as though this might actually be a good thing.

  So then I start worrying about what his parents will be like. Maybe Logan is the family freak and everyone else is like Franco, which would make Mr. Losino’s interest in sasquatches more understandable: it may be more like genealogy research to him, given Franco’s resemblance to whatever it was I saw in the river.

  Logan pushes a swinging door into the kitchen. He introduces me to his parents who look remarkably normal, but since my parents look pretty normal too, I know how insignificant this is. His dad is dishing up ice cream and his mom has been reading the paper. No sign of Franco, fortunately.

  Mr. Losino tells me to take a seat at the table and he serves me a bowl of maple walnut ice cream which is not my favourite but of course I know better than to say so. I take a spoonful and tell him that it is delicious. Mrs. Losino is watching me carefully. I know what this is about. I have to say something or she’ll be thinking her son is a pedophile.

  “I have Turner Syndrome,” I tell her. “I know I look like an eight-year-old, but really, I’m almost fifteen.”

  “Oh,” says Mrs. Losino. She places a hand on my arm. “Thank you for telling me, Sylvia, though that isn’t what I was thinking. I’m sorry if I was staring. It’s just that I’ve been hearing about you since you were in grade one with Logan…”

  “Mom!” says Logan.

  She’s been hearing about me? Like what a midget nitwit I am?

  “Good things, of course,” says Mrs. Losino.

  “Mom!” says Logan.

  Good things? Since grade one? Even I couldn’t think of good stories about me from grade one.

  Mrs. Losino sighs. “And then, on meeting you, I thought maybe you were another late bloomer, like Logan, which would be nice for him.”

  Logan makes a moaning sound and drops his forehead to the table.

  Logan is a late bloomer? I always thought he was kind of perfect, in a boyish sort of way. But obviously she doesn’t understand about Turner Syndrome. “I took human growth hormone for a while, but it increased my intracranial pressure and I had to stop, so I will always be short. I’m supposed to start estrogen therapy soon. Who knows what side effects I’ll have to that. I may never bloom.”

  After a moment, Mrs. Losino nods her head. “I’m sorry, I think my choice of the phrase late bloomer was unfortunate,” she says.

  “I’ll second that,” says Mr. Losino. “She looks pretty blooming good to me just the way she is.”

  Now I see where Logan gets his sense of humor.

  Not that he’s finding any of this very funny apparently. He’s still hiding his face. Mr. Losino punches him on the shoulder. “Get it, Logan? Blooming good?”

  Logan lifts his head, looks at me and rolls his eyes. “I get it, Dad,” he says.

  Mrs. Losino tells us she has some lessons to prepare and she’ll leave us to it.

  I’m left in the kitchen with Logan and his dad.

  As soon as Mrs. Losino disappears, Mr. Losino adds three extra scoops of ice cream to his bowl then reaches into the back of the refrigerator and brings out a wide-mouthed white plastic container which he carries back to the table. There’s a blue and white label identifying it as “Copper Sulfate Crystals” and there’s a skull and crossbones over some text that’s too small for me to read. “Want some?” he says to Logan.

  I have to admit, I don’t have much experience with the dinner table rules of normal families (my own and Auntie Sally’s don’t qualify), so I have to make an effort to be open-minded, but having poison crystals sprinkled on my dessert is way more than I can handle.

  Mr. Losino unscrews the cap, turns the container upside down, and a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup lands in his palm. Now why would that have to be stored in a container? We never have it at our house. I’ve asked Mom to buy it for us, but she says it’s full of sugar and palm oil and saturated fat and having it in the kitchen would be like pointing a loaded gun at my father’s aorta.

  Mr. Losino squirts about a cup of the stuff over his ice cream, then offers it to me and Logan. Logan says no way, but I’m still mad at my mom, plus I think the chocolate will be perfect for camouflaging the maple walnut flavour, so I hold out my bowl and get a big puddle of it. I hope Mom won’t be able to smell it on my breath. Mr. Losino puts the ice cream back in the freezer compartment, then re-packages the syrup and tucks it in behind some other storage containers in the fridge.

  “I told you your mom wouldn’t find it in there, Logan,” says Mr. Losino.

  “Franco either,” says Logan.

  They hide chocolate syrup. Perhaps this isn’t a normal family either.

  “Log
an tells me you saw something interesting down at the river,” says Mr. Losino, taking his seat at the table. He stirs his ice cream into total mush, something I’m never allowed to do. At my house this would be referred to as “playing with your food,” punishable by death-by-lecture.

  I drag my attention away from Mr. Losino’s bowl. I nod. I’m not sure what to say.

  “You want to tell me about it?” says Mr. Losino. A dribble of mush is caught in his beard. I try not to stare, not that it would matter, because Mr. Losino isn’t looking at me at all.

  “Okay,” I say, and then my brain seizes up and I can’t think of what words to use. Mr. Losino doesn’t prompt me, which helps me relax. He slurps his ice cream as though we’ve got all the time in the world. Logan smiles encouragingly.

  “At first I thought it was a bear,” I say.

  Mr. Losino grunts and says, “That’s what most people think when they see one.”

  “Then I saw it move, and it was so powerful and graceful that it reminded me of a werewolf I saw in a movie, except it didn’t have a face like a wolf, so I thought it might be a were-ape.”

  Mr. Losino nods his head. “Interesting hypothesis.”

  He’s not telling me I’m stupid, or mentally ill, or that I’m deceiving myself. This is great. So I tell him about talking to Dr. Cleveland and how she said that ideas attract evidence and perhaps I’d already been thinking about large scary things, at which point Logan interrupts and says, “Such as Franco, for example.”

  They laugh, and eventually I join in to show that I’m not scared of Franco either. At least not at the moment.

  I explain about my Google research and how I found the article on Ardipithecus which was interesting because it was about an upright ape, not a knuckle-walker, though most of the article was beyond me so I gave it to Logan to help translate.

  Mr. Losino says, “That was some impressive research you did. You could think about pursuing a career in science.”

  A scientist! I haven’t thought of that. All I’ve ever wanted to be is the best rider possible. Maybe if I worked part-time as a scientist I would earn enough money and have time to ride. I like doing research on the Internet so this could be perfect for me…but then I remember. “I’m really bad at math,” I say.

  Mr. Losino shrugs as though this is not significant. “You have an active enquiring mind, which is more important in my opinion. You persist with your research until you find answers that make sense to you. Really, your finding the similarity to Aridipithecus ramidus is quite remarkable, though I’ve been focusing on Gigantopithecus myself.”

  Logan mutters something about Francopithecus that I don’t quite catch.

  “Though we have to admit that both Ardipithecus and Gigantopithecus have been extinct for quite a while so what you saw down by the river is clearly something else,” says Mr. Losino. Finally he looks me in the eye. “You’re a very lucky person. I’ve been wanting to see one my whole life. All I’ve ever found is footprints.” He pushes his chair back from the table. “Come on, I’ll show you the plaster casts.” He swings open a door to a dark stairwell at the back of the kitchen. He flicks on a light which doesn’t make a lot of difference, and I really wonder what I’m getting myself into this time but I follow him and Logan down into the basement, where I learn everything I never knew about sasquatches.

  chapter

  sixteen

  Every morning for the rest of the week I ride Pinky to meet Logan, and he takes my hand and walks with me to school, and just before he leaves me at my locker he says, “Have you told them yet?” and I have to say no.

  Mr. Losino has asked me to tell my parents as soon as possible, because he wants me to take him to where I saw the sasquatch so that he can add to his research project, and he won’t do that without my parents’ permission.

  I can’t tell them. I know how they would react. My mom would go all psychoanalytic on me, which would be even worse than what Dr. Cleveland had to say, and Dad would be overprotective and take out a big game hunting license and buy a gun.

  So I put it off. I didn’t even say anything to Mom when she picked me up at the Losinos’ that first night and I was busting with all sorts of information about sasquatches. Mom wasn’t very talkative anyway, so I figured she and Dad had a major dust-up while I was out of the house.

  Mr. Losino has recommended I not tell anyone else, and that after I do tell my parents, I’m not to let them call anyone, such as the newspaper, or the police, Fish and Game, Wildlife Services, or National Defense. Mr. Losino said that no one would believe us or they’d make it into a big circus. He said definitely not to call a circus either. Not even Cirque de Soleil, which I understand has a better reputation than most.

  There’s one more reason I’m not telling my parents. I don’t want to go back to the river, even accompanied by a sasquatch scientist. As long as I don’t tell Mom and Dad, Mr. Losino won’t be able to take me on that investigative field trip.

  Every day I can see how disappointed Logan is, even though he tries to hide it.

  Every night I dream I’m at the river and see the sasquatch, and I try to take charge of the dream and make the sasquatch disappear, but I can’t do it. Plus I always end up being covered with hair in places I’m not supposed to have it even after I develop secondary sexual characteristics. The worst part is that I’ve become so paranoid that in the mornings I examine myself carefully and I swear I’m starting to see hair growing on my chest. I have to hold the flashlight really close to my skin, at an awkward angle, not shining in my eyes, and it’s like I’m covered with this downy baby fur and I’m sure it wasn’t there before.

  I know I have an active imagination, and once in the past I convinced myself that I was a hermaphrodite and another time I thought I was some sort of human/unicorn hybrid, but there was no real evidence for any of that…except for the bony lump on my forehead which I still have. Still, the hair is not imaginary. It’s really there, and I have no idea why.

  I can’t tell anyone either. They would want to see.

  Granted, I have told Brooklyn because I can tell him anything and everything and he just accepts it—not that being covered by hair would be a problem from his point of view. I don’t know what I would do without Brooklyn, even though he’s not very impressed with me these days because I won’t ride him outside of the ring, and unless Kansas is there I’m not allowed to jump, and Kansas always says she’s too tired or she’s not feeling well. I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She never used to be like this.

  I guess I could talk to Taylor, but whenever I see her in the cafeteria she’s with that big lump Franco and I’m afraid she’ll tell him, and then he would tell Logan, and my life would be ruined.

  So I have two secrets weighing on me, and at the end of the week I’m done.

  On Friday night during dinner, I decide I have to tell my parents about the sasquatch. I do some deep breathing exercises. I square my shoulders. I don’t have to wait for a pause in the conversation because no one’s saying anything. I clear my throat. That’s when the phone rings. It’s Grandpa calling from Saskatchewan. Mom takes the call when she hears his voice on the answering machine even though we’re not supposed to talk to anyone during family meal times. She takes the cordless phone out of earshot into the family room. Dad pulls out his BlackBerry and reads his text messages and laughs. I sit by myself and play with my mashed potatoes, wishing I had some chocolate syrup.

  The evening deteriorates badly from this point.

  Mom comes back to the table and reports that Grandpa has found a great last minute seat sale with WestJet. He’ll be here tomorrow and he’s staying two weeks.

  “Tomorrow?” says Dad. “For two weeks? What are we supposed to do with him for two whole weeks?”

  “He wants to see how Sylvia is doing with Brooklyn,” says Mom.

  “He could
do that in one day,” says Dad.

  “What do you care, you’re going to be working all the time anyway,” says Mom. “Or playing golf.”

  “I will not,” says Dad. “I’m a better host than that.”

  I used to not worry too much when my parents argued because they always made up, but that doesn’t seem to happen any more. Mom used to get uptight and quote textbooks and Dad would make jokes until she started to laugh, then they would go to their bedroom. Now Mom stays pretty calm and Dad goes volcanic, and no one makes any jokes. I used to be pretty disgusted at their making-up sessions, but now I wish those days were back.

  Mom isn’t giving any ground, not that she was ever any good at that. I notice she has her non-face on, the expressionless mask she learned to use for her psychotherapy work. Something’s up. I hope Grandpa isn’t sick. I hope he isn’t making one last trip out to see us before he dies.

  “Besides,” Mom says, “we probably won’t have to entertain him at all this time. He’s bringing a friend.” Her professional face is crumbling. Is she trying not to cry? She slices a miniscule cube off her pork chop and stabs it with her fork but leaves it on the plate.

  Dad doesn’t notice. He’s trying to load a pile of meat, potatoes and peas onto his fork and the peas keep falling off. “Great,” he mutters. “Two senile old farts to watch over.”

  “Dad!” I say.

  “Not exactly,” says Mom. “He’s bringing his girlfriend.”

  chapter

  seventeen

  We don’t even have to pick them up at the airport. Grandpa says there are so many things Isobel wants to see that it will be better if they rent a car.

  Our Saturday is shot anyway, because we have to tidy the house and make up the guest room and Mom tries to sound breezy and carefree when she says that Grandpa told her one bed would be fine, but it’s bothering her. It kind of bothers me too, if I let myself think about it.

  Plus we have to go grocery shopping, meaning me and Mom. She insisted Dad not cancel his golf game, she said she didn’t want that noble selfless sacrifice hanging over her head, whatever that means. Dad squealed his tires on the way out the driveway, so he wasn’t very happy about it. Maybe he didn’t want to play golf today?