Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman

Author:Alexandra Kleeman [Kleeman, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

SIX

In second grade, Cassidy Carter owned a parakeet named Charlene, a candy-colored creature that lived in an aquamarine cage. Though its entire body was barely six and a half inches long, counting the soft-edged tailfeathers, it could pronounce several humanlike sounds—not whole words, but soft coughs, whistles, and a noise exactly like a shy teenage girl’s “um.” After school, Cassidy and June would sit at the square table, doing homework, while the bird mumbled to itself nearby, flying from one short bound of the cage to another. Then, one day, the bird was dead. Cassidy searched the internet for answers: a budgie could die from dehydration, stray airborne molecules of frying-pan Teflon, paint fumes, caffeine, peanuts, avocado, parrot flu, tumors, direct sunlight and heating vents, eating too much fruit too fast, and countless other causes. “This is the whole problem with a bird,” her father said. “They don’t know how to ask for anything, can’t call for help. Listen, that’s why animals die so often, because they are no damn good at getting anyone’s attention.” Charlene was buried in a handkerchief beneath a purple-painted rock, never again to blink her blue-skinned eyelids in lizardlike quickness.

When Cassidy refused to sit for dinner that night (how could she eat when Charlene would never eat again?), her mother accused her of pretending. As Rita Carter would explain it to her own mother, she was blessed with one daughter who saw life as it was, and burdened by another who couldn’t help but spin a web of drama around every little thing, however minor and insignificant. The first one was happy to sit silently in church, tracing the lines on her palm with a fingertip, while the other sighed and wriggled and complained of being strangled by her clothing, being about to pass out, about to have a seizure. Even at that age, she could fake a grand mal with enough gusto to stop the sermon in its tracks, lolling on the ground and shaken by invisible hands; she had learned the signs from a rerun of ER. Cassidy saw shallow performances all around her, and she knew that she could do better, given a chance. At home, her mother marched through scene after scene, argument and reconciliation, and her father seemed to forget his lines, going out to the garage to smoke when he couldn’t think of any way to respond. She wished they would put more effort into their craft, pretend at something bigger, act out some facsimile of love until it conjured the real. But at least there was June, who could tell when Cass was putting on a show and when the real feelings were breaking through; June, who made Cass feel less fake. You only needed one other person to see what you were seeing in order to make it real: two people seeing the same thing, in fact, was more real than a whole roomful of people seeing it and sneering. After dinner was done, June brought peanut-butter toast on a plate, sprinkled with sunflower seeds, to their bedroom doorway.

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