Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,11
week.
She winked at us. “Hey, Kiri. Den-Den. Have you guys looked around yet?”
“Well, we had a quick look,” tittered Mom, which was so blatant a lie I twisted around, eyes wide with outrage, to glare at her.
“We can’t stay for too long,” said Dad. “I’ve got a conference call at eight.”
Sukey’s face flashed with something sharp and fierce, and for a terrible moment I thought they were about to have one of their fights. Leon’s friends from the art collective had organized the show, and even at ten I had a vague sense that maybe that was why Mom and Dad were acting so weird. Leon was helping Sukey become a famous artist, but Mom thought he was too old for her and Dad said he was a Cradle-Robbing Junkie and that if Sukey thought he was going to help her become an artist, she needed to get her head checked.
Sukey and Dad stared each other down. Across the room, I could hear the monkey-women hooting and chortling with mirth. Dad’s jaw was clenched, and Sukey’s eyes had narrowed to smoldering points of black. But just when it seemed like things were about to get really nasty, she broke eye contact with Dad and smiled at me and Denny instead.
“Kiri, Den-Den, did you see there’s pink lemonade?”
The mention of pink lemonade was almost more than I could stand. My face crumpled. “Dad said we couldn’t have any.”
I fought back the tears that were stabbing at the corners of my eyes. Beside me, Denny stared into his Game Boy screen and Mom kept up her wheedling hum.
“Oh, honey,” said Sukey. “Come with me.”
Without so much as a second glance at Dad, she took my grubby hand in her soft, vanilla-scented one and led me on a personal tour of the gallery. Our first stop was the snack table, where she poured me a cup of lemonade, rose-pink and thick with sugar, the kind that leaves sour flecks of lemon pulp on the back of your throat after you swallow. I remember the clear plastic cup and the square paper napkin I used to hold my Ritz crackers, salty and oily to the lemonade’s sweet. We took our snacks and made a slow circle around the crowded room, stopping in front of each of Sukey’s paintings. Every five seconds, another one of her friends would tap her on the shoulder and she’d spin around, beaming, to greet them.
“Hey, Neale,” she’d say—or Wanda, or Feather, or Björn. “This is my little sister, Kiri.” Their kindness, when they smiled at me, was mixed with bafflement, as if they could hardly believe that such a rare and dangerous creature as Sukey was related to such a plain and pudgy one as me.
When we said hi to Leon, he plucked the yellow flower he was wearing out of his buttonhole and slid it behind my ear. Leon was half Japanese, half German, and for a Cradle-Robbing Junkie he looked awfully dashing in his suit.
“Her name was Ki-ri, she was a showgirl,” he sang, twirling me around like a ballerina while Sukey clapped her hands and laughed and laughed. When he was finished twirling me, he twirled Sukey, then dipped her like a tango dancer and kissed her on the lips. I looked on in awe and jealousy. The rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to Sukey: She laughed and cried and yelled and danced without checking Dad’s face first to see which one she was allowed to do. It was like she didn’t even know you were supposed to.
Sukey’s friends reminded me of the acrobats in Cirque du Soleil, which Dad’s business partner, Sydney, had given us tickets to see—like at any moment they were about to swing from the ceiling, leap from the table, walk on their hands. They smelled like fizzy drinks and twitched a little, like mice. I’d never met adults like that before and hardly believed they existed.
“Kiri’s a fabulous musician,” Sukey told them. “You should hear the songs she plays on her keyboard.”
Whenever Sukey spoke, it was like I was eating one of the magical cakes in Alice in Wonderland. I grew taller and taller until my head bumped the ceiling, and the unhappiness of an hour ago shrank to the size of a pebble on the ground.
We paraded around the room, eating cheese cubes and chatting with Sukey’s glamorous friends, while Mom and Dad hovered awkwardly near the exit, checking their phones and talking to no one. Every