A Mystery Revealed, Maybe

We were sitting at the table tonight and I was trying to choke down a bowl of lentil soup (which is just plain wrong, but you don't really argue diet with my mother) when my dad spoke up.

"Allie called this afternoon."

I almost spat my soup across the table and both parents turned their puzzled faces toward me. I mumbled something about a lentil in my going down the wrong pipe and ending up in my sinuses and tried to look nonchalant as I continued eating, face to the bowl but eyes up.

Stanley just kept silently poking around in his bowl.

Allie had picked a good day to speak with them. Dad had just signed up for a pottery class and was riding high on the promise of the beautiful works of art he was sure he'd be creating in no time at all.

"She just sent me an e-mail this afternoon at work," said Mom. "She was wearing that sweater I gave her at Christmas. You know, the one of Van Gogh's Sunflowers."

I can say this for Allie: she does her homework and covers the bases.

"What did she have to say?" Mom continued.

Dad put his spoon down into the bowl. "Not an awful lot. Asked how things were going, whether Stanley was still doing the New Edisons, and whatnot. She wanted permission to go on an exchange for a week."

"An exchange?"

My eyebrows were up by this point.

"Some sort of exchange, just for two weeks, between Pennington's and Hirschfeld College." Hirschfeld college was another private girls' school about three hours further down the highway from Pennington. "Something new they're trying this year. I said you and I would talk about it tomorrow."

"Why so soon?" my mother asked, still unfazed.

"I guess the deadline for applying's the end of the week." That explained Allie's direct approach today. "She faxed through some information. It's upstairs. Seems good to me."

"Fine with me," Mom said, standing and collecting our bowls. She reached for Stanley's but he put out a hand. The rim of his bowl was ringed with neatly arranged lentils.

"Hold on," he said. "I'm working on Fibonacci numbers."

Mom shrugged and took my bowl. "Martin, you barely ate any of your soup."

I'd been to fixated on trying to figure out Allie's angle.

I didn't point out that Stanley hadn't eaten any more than I had.

The Tree

I guess I should explain a bit about my family.

From the outside we probably look sickeningly typical. Two parents. Three kids. A cat. All living in a two-storey house in the suburbs.

But let me tell you, from the inside, we're anything from typical. I don't pretend to be anyone's idea of an ideal son (or brother, or friend, or cool kid at the high school, for that matter) but somehow I'm the normal one in this family. Scary thought.

My parents, Stan and Shiela, are in their early forties and have somehow managed to hold down decent jobs for the past couple of decades. Dad's the head librarian at the city library and mom is some sort of efficiency expert. Basically she goes into businesses and says, "You people waste a load of time/energy/money/brain cells," and tells them how to fix things. As far as I can tell, she is reposible for a third of the unemployment in three counties.

It's their hobbies that makes my parents odd, mostly. Mom has started knitting works of art. Literally. A few years back, she gave me a sweater for my birthday, featuring some hideous interpretation of Van Gogh's Starry Night. She practically stuffed me into it, proud as punch, and sent me off to school. Impressionism and homeknitted wear do not make for easy social integration. I wore my coat almost the entire day, until the teacher assumed I was having "the chills" and sent me to the school nurse to be checked out.

Then there's Dad. He changes hobbies more than most kids take showers. Two months ago, it was sword swallowing, but after a terrifying birthday party and a visit to emergency that was nixed. Next was going to be water polo, but he didn't have much luck recruiting players to start a recreational league in the town. Lately it's been the trombone. I try to be out of the house as much as possible.

As for the kids, there's me who, at 17, is the oldest and dullest, but when I look at the other two, I'm happy to have that distinction.

Allie is 14. What's most noticeable about her place in our house is that it's usually vacant. She was sent to boarding school the year she turned 13. Wait. I guess "sent" isn't the right word. "Was finally allowed to attend" would be better. From the time she was six or seven, she pestered Mom and Dad to send her to boarding school -- no specific explanation, just an obsession which stuck around much longer than expected. When she turned 13, she successfully argued that she was now a teenager and was therefore old enough to live away from home. She attends The Pennington Academy, an all-girl school about two hours from our house. We see her on holidays, long weekends, and whenever. Come to think of it, maybe she was onto something.

Finally, there's Stanley, Jr. who at seven is a bit too analytical for his own good. Personally, I think he needs an analyst. He wears this battered blue suit jacket and some sort of tie almost all the time, even when he's playing outside. He asks lots of questions, which is fine sometimes, but not so fine if you're in the middle of a movie, almost at the end of a hard level in Crash Mandarin, or trying desperately to look nonchalant at the food court in the mall. My big question is why's he Stanley, Jr. when I'm the first born?

See? I'm looking at what I've written and one thing becomes clear: with a family like this, I don't stand a chance.