Inside, a barrage of sounds, colors, and smells made me dizzy. This house smelled like people. Piles of shoes and boots of all sizes lay near the door, surrounded by puddles of melted snow. Damp coats and snowsuits hung from hooks, and the scents of sweat and wet wool mingled with those of hot chocolate and toast and something I couldn’t identify, which turned out to be wet dog.
Mrs. McG led me down a corridor into the kitchen. There, up and down a battered table, sprawled her children. A boy about six years old paused in the act of spitting at one of his sisters to say, “We got company!”
The others stared at me. A large yellow dog walked over and stuck his wet nose against my leg.
“Hi.” It was one of the older boys, dark-haired, wearing a plaid shirt.
“Who are you?” A small girl with green eyes looked up at me.
A taller girl flipped her long reddish braid over her shoulder and stood up. She smiled. “This is Ari,” she said to the others. “I’m Kathleen,” she said to me. “Mom said you were coming.”
“Sit here.” The girl with green eyes pulled another chair to the table next to her.
I sat. There were ten of them, altogether. They had bright eyes and flushed cheeks, and they watched me curiously. The dog curled up under the table at my feet.
Kathleen set before me a mug of cocoa with a large marshmallow melting in it. Someone else gave me a plate of toast splotched with cinnamon and butter. I took a sip and a bite. “It’s delicious,” I said, and they looked pleased.
“Take your time and settle in,” Mrs. McG said. “Later you can try to learn their names. You’ll never remember so many.”
“Even Mom can’t remember sometimes,” Kathleen said. “She calls us ‘girl’ or ‘boy.’”
“Do you like sledding?” another dark-haired boy asked.
“I’ve never tried it,” I said. I licked marshmallow foam from my lips.
“Never tried sledding?” His voice was skeptical.
“Miss Ari hasn’t spent much time outdoors,” Mrs. McG said. “She’s not a ruffian like you all are.”
“I’m not a ruffian,” the girl with green eyes said. She had a tiny nose with two freckles on it. “I’m too petite to be a ruffian.”
“Petite!” Some of the others repeated the word in mocking voices.
“Bridget’s plump, not petite. Plump as a piglet,” said the older boy. “My name is Michael,” he said, while Bridget protested.
“When Michael goes to bed at night, he sleeps like a soldier,” Kathleen said. She stood up straight and rigid, hands at her sides. “Like that he sleeps. Never moves all night long.”
“Not like Kathleen,” Michael said. “She tosses all the covers off and then wakes up shivering.”
They seemed endlessly fascinated by each other. New voices chimed in, talking about how this one woke up before dawn, and that one talked in his sleep. I ate my toast and drank my cocoa, listening to them as if they were faraway birds.
“You all right?” It was Kathleen’s voice, close to my ear.
“I’m fine.”
“We’re a noisy bunch. Mom says we’re worse than monkeys.” Kathleen flipped her braid back again. It had a way of creeping back over her shoulder, no matter how hard she flipped it. She had a small face, rather plain, but it dimpled when she smiled. “Are you thirteen?”
“Twelve,” I said. “Thirteen this summer.”
“When’s your birthday?”
Gradually the others left the room, and finally, only Kathleen and I were left at the table. She talked about pets and clothes and television shows, things that I knew little about — if anything, only from books.
“Do you always dress like that?” She said it without malice.
I gazed at my plain starched white-cotton shirt and loose-fitting starched dark pants. “Yes.” I felt like adding, Blame your mother. She buys my clothes.
To be fair, Mrs. McG hadn’t always bought me drab clothing. When I was very young, perhaps two or three, she bought a bright paisley playsuit, its colors a swirl of red and green and blue. My father winced when he saw it and asked her to take it off me at once.
Kathleen wore tight jeans and a purple t-shirt. I wondered, why weren’t they starched?
“Mom said you need some color in your life.” Kathleen stood up. “Come and see my room.”
On the way to Kathleen’s room we passed a cluttered space with a television set along one wall. “That’s the big screen Dad bought us for Christmas,” Kathleen said.
McGarritts were stuffed into two sofas and assorted chairs, others lying on pillows on the carpet; all eyes were on the screen, which displayed moving images of an odd creature.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Space alien,” she said. “Michael’s big on the Sci-Fi channel.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d never seen a TV before. I said, “Ray Bradbury writes about space aliens.”
“Never heard of him.” She was climbing stairs now, and I followed. She opened the door of a room slightly bigger than my bedroom closet. “Enter,” she said.
The room was crowded with things: a bunk bed, two small bureaus, a desk and chair, a fuzzy red carpet on the floor littered with shoes. It had no windows, and the walls were covered with posters and pictures cut out of magazines. A black box on top of a bureau boomed music; next to it were CD cases, but none I recognized; at home we had mostly classical music, symphonies and operas.
“What sort of music do you like?” I asked.
“Punk, pop, rock. This is the Cankers.” She gestured at a poster over the desk: a longhaired man dressed in black, his mouth open in a kind of snarl. “I love them. Don’t you?”
“I’ve never heard of them,” I said.
She looked at me for a second and said, “Oh, never mind. I guess it’s true what Mom said? That you’ve led a sheltered life?”
I said I thought the description fairly apt.
My first visit to the McGarritt house felt endless at times, but as we drove home it seemed to have lasted only minutes. I was overwhelmed by unfamiliarity. Mr. McGarritt, a large round man with a large bald head, had come home for supper; it was spaghetti, and Mrs. McG made a special nonmeat sauce for me, which tasted surprisingly good.
Everyone crowded around the long table, eating and talking and interrupting; the younger children talked about school and how a boy named Ford was bullying them; Michael vowed he would take care of Ford; his mother said he would not do any such thing; his father said enough of that, and the yellow dog (they called him Wally, short for Wal-Mart, a store near where he’d been found) let out a howl. They all laughed, even Mr. and Mrs. McG.
“Is it true that you don’t go to school?” Bridget asked me. She’d finished her food before anyone else.
My mouth full, I nodded.
“Lucky,” Bridget said.
I swallowed. “Don’t you like school?”
She shook her head. “People make fun of us.”
The table fell quiet for a moment. I turned to Kathleen, who sat next to me, and whispered, “Is that so?”
Kathleen’s expression was hard to read; she seemed angry and embarrassed, and ashamed of her feelings, all at once. “Yes,” she said, her voice low. “We’re the only ones who don’t have computers and cell phones.” Then, in a clear voice, she said, “The rich ones make fun of all the scholarship kids. It’s not just us.”
Mrs. McG rose and began to clear plates, and everyone began to talk again.
It wasn’t anything like the way conversations proceeded at home; here, they interrupted and disagreed, and shouted and laughed loudly and talked while they ate, and no one seemed to mind. At home sentences were always finished; dialogues were logical, evenly paced, thoughtful; they progressed in undulating Hegelian spirals, considering all alternatives before reaching syntheses. There wasn’t much silliness at my house, I realized that night, as Mrs. McG drove me home.
After I had thanked her and come inside, I found my father reading in his chair near the fireplace, waiting for me. “How was your outing?” he asked. He sat back in his leather chair, his eyes invisible in the shadows.
I thought of all I’d seen and heard and wondered how I could possibly describe it all. “It was very nice,” I said cautiously.
My father flinched at the words. “Your face is flushed,” he said. “It’s time that you went to bed.”
When I’d left the McGarritts, Kathleen had flung her arms around me in an impulsive goodbye hug. I imagined crossing the room and hugging my father goodnight. Even the thought of it was ludicrous.
“Good night,” I said, and headed upstairs, still wearing my coat.
Early the next morning, something awakened me. Still half asleep, I stumbled out of bed and went to the windows.
Then came a sound — a high-pitched howl — like nothing I’d ever heard. It seemed to come from the back garden. More alert now, I went to the window that overlooked it, peering down, seeing nothing but a faint gleam of snow in the darkness.
The noise stopped. A second later I heard a thud, as if something had hit the house. A shadowy form of a person strode out of the garden toward the street. I followed the figure with my eyes. Was it my father?
I must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing I heard was Mrs. McG, screaming. The room was light. I raced down the stairs.
She stood outside, trembling slightly, in her winter coat (with the imitation-fox collar) and an imitation-mink hat. She seemed to shrink when she saw me. “Don’t look, Ari,” she said.
But I’d already seen Marmalade lying on the steps, the snow near her splotched with blood.
Mrs. McG said, “Poor cat. Poor innocent creature. What kind of animal would do such a thing?”
“Get back inside.” Mary Ellis Root hissed the words at me. She lifted me by my shoulders and set me down in the corridor beyond the kitchen. Then she brushed past me and shut the kitchen door firmly behind her.
After a few seconds I flung open the door. The kitchen was empty. I went to the back door, and through the window next to it I saw Root lifting the cat. Marmalade’s body was rigid; her neck had been broken, and the sight of her jaw facing skyward made me want to scream.
Root carried the carcass past the window, out of sight, but as she passed me I saw her face, her fleshy lips curved in a tight smile.