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hightailed it out of the forest via the blonde poof on
her head. She looked at us, then tilted her head and squinted her eyes. I guess
she saw something other than I did, which was two girls power-lifting a log that
stank like wet leaves. "Okay," she said, and nodded, pleased.
    "Don't tell me you're really going to stick a
tree branch on our wall," Melissa said.
    "To each his or her own," Diane sang. "Just set
it down there on that plastic sheet."
    "Oh, God, a spider." Melissa shook the sleeve
of her shirt.
    "Careful, Melissa." Diane Beene scurried for
the television listings, bent down to let it crawl onto the paper. "Quick, open
the door."
    "I can whack it with my shoe," I said. You
should have seen the looks I got.
    While they made sure the living being who
shared our earth got safely outside, I went to the small guest bathroom to wash
my hands. Here
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    the walls were ringed with stenciled seashells.
Also, there were little seashell soaps and folded seashell towels that you
weren't supposed to really use, and small seashell books you weren't supposed to
really read.
    "You didn't cut that off a live tree, did you,
Diane?" I yelled to her over the running water. I pulled my shirt out of my
jeans, dried my hands on the tail, and rejoined her, Melissa, and the
branch.
    "Oh, my God," she said. "Oh, my God." She
sounded just like Melissa. She put her hand to her head like she couldn't
believe what her brain had done without her permission. "Do you think people
will think that? I found it on the ground. I swear."
    "It was my first thought," I
said.
    Diane sat down. "I'm going to have to
reconsider this," she said.
    "It's fine, Mom," Melissa said. "No one's gonna
think that. Jordan hardly represents the entire population." She scowled at
me.
    "I don't know," Mrs. Beene said.
    "Trust me," Melissa said. When she pulled me
upstairs to her room, she said, "Real nice, Jordan."
    "What?" I said.
    "She was excited about that stupid branch.
Sometimes you just don't think enough about other people."
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    Another day, when Kale Kramer hadn't just given
me his hat, she would have laughed. It wasn't true, anyway. According to my
mother, I thought about other people too much. "Someday you've got to figure out
how to belong to yourself," she always said, which sounded like more of that
seventies "Find Yourself" nonsense she was so fond of. The idea of having to
find yourself always cracked me up. How exactly would this work? You wander away
from yourself one day, end up roaming around some small town, until you finally
pull up alongside yourself and say, Hey Jordan, glad I found you. What the
heck are you doing here?
    "I'll go down and tell her I love her branch,"
I said.
    "Seriously," Melissa said.
    A loud, angry voice doing a bad Texas accent,
muffled only slightly by the bedroom wall, stopped all conversation about my
behavior. "God, I hate him. Just ignore him," Melissa said.
    "What's he doing?"
    "He's been calling radio shows. That dumb-ass
Peppy Johnson your father likes."
    I put my ear to the wall. "All you are is a
yellow-bellied snake if you think that cow dung ain't a vi-able natural
re-source." Pause. "Why, you can make clo-thing outta cow patties. You should
see the shirt I got on."
    "You don't want to listen," she
said.
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    But I did. I kept my ear to the wall. I liked
Jackson's sense of humor. Melissa let out an exasperated yell, stomped out of
her room, and began to pound on Jackson's door. "Would you shut the hell up in
there?"
    I scooted off the bed and poked my head around
the corner. Veins were practically snapping from Melissa's neck. The voice
quieted, then stopped. I could hear the clunking of a phone being settled into
its receiver. The door opened a crack, and Jackson's head popped out.
    "Evening," he drawled.
    He smiled at me. I smiled back. There was
always something about the way Jackson looked at me that made me feel like he
really knew who I was. I didn't know the