All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison Page A

shoulder. “Give her a week and she’ll be back to her old self.”
    I think Big Bill really believed that. There was no use pushing him further. I’d only run into a short ending. I ducked his massive hand and turned to leave.
    “Will?”
    “What?”
    “Well, son … ”
    “What already?
    “Look … you’re fi fteen years old.”
    “Uh, yeah?”
    “I’m not exactly sure how to put this, but … Don’t you think it’s time to start … well, you know, spreading your wings a little?”
    I was determined to make this hard on my father, though it was plenty hard for him already. “My wings?”
    “Well, I mean … socially? Don’t you think that maybe you’re just a little too … attached to your sister?”
    “She’s not my sister.”
    “Well, it amounts to the same thing. You should make some friends, branch out, join a club or something.”
    “A club?”
    “Well, yeah, sure. An after-school thing. Chess club, or something. Debate club. Don’t they have a support group for vegetarians?
    The point is, branch out. Give your sister a little—”
    “She’s not my sister.”
    “—give her a little space. Let her work through this stuff. How’d you like to start lifting?”
    “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    “Why not?”
    “ Why?”
    “Okay, then. Fair enough. Just tossing that out there.” He zipped up his sausage bag. “But you better do something, Will. It’s time. You need to give her some breathing room from here on out. Otherwise, you’re going to suffocate her.”
    He slung his sausage over his shoulder and patted me on the back on his way out of the room.
    Come September, Lulu and I wound up with one elective together—
    Sociology, with Kimball. Though there were empty seats both directly in front of and behind me, Lulu sat all the way across the room in the back corner. I must have craned my neck at least two dozen times per period to look back at her. Surely she felt my Martian eyes upon her, but she never let on. Then, craning my neck one afternoon, I caught her looking at me, just once, just for an instant, and I felt the tickle of a fl ame in my sternum, a dry lump in my throat.
    The next day she wasn’t in class. I waited for her at her locker between third and fourth periods.
    “Where were you?”
    “I switched to Current Events.”
    “Why?”
    “Gaskil’s easy,” she said, opening her locker. “I had her for Civics last year. Besides, Mr. Kimball weirds me out.”
    “You’re lying.”
    Her face was hidden in the locker, where she rummaged about mechanically.
    “What’s wrong with you, Lu? What did I do?”
    “Just stop! You didn’t do anything, okay?” She shut her locker and turned to face me, but avoided my eyes. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing past me. “I need to get to Lit. Berringer’s on the rag.”
    At home, sheer repetition managed to cut through some of the tension around the dinner table, but the dark cloud lingered. Lulu wore the same clothes three and four days in a row. She was forever locked away in her bedroom, often so quiet that Willow would tap on the door. “Lu, honey, are you in there?”
    “Yeah.”
    Two weeks before homecoming, she quit the cheerleading squad.
    “Please,” she said. “Those girls are cheerful like sharks.”
    She showed no interest in boys, or other girls, or dancing, or fl ying, or learning to drive.
    “Drive where?” she said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
    Even a Sunday trip to Cabazon could not awaken her appetites.
    We had to coax her out of the van.
    “Please, can we go now?”
    And the farther Lulu drifted from all of us, the farther we all seemed to drift from each other.
    Yet, through it all, her grades never slipped. She made honor roll junior year.
    As for me, I may have looked studious in my twelve-pound glasses, but I couldn’t bring myself to study. I’d sit on my bed, a fi fteen-year-old atop Tony the Tiger sheets, surrounded by other childhood relics—action fi gures and View-Mast ers and