Annie XIX: Sitter

Annie XIX: Sitter

(Chronological index: High School (1st time for Raymond, 2nd time for Annie))

Raymond left the Xeroxed sheets on the desk. Annie walked across them as he packed. "What's this about airtight containers?" she asked.

"We have to have bear proof our food while we're out of our tent area," he said.

"BEAR Proof?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's a wilderness area. No food near the water, it'll attract allighators, no food out where it'll attract bears, and we hang the sleeping bags on a rope during the day."

"To air them out?" she said in a small voice.

"So that snakes don't crawl into them before we come back to sleep," he said with a shrug. He found his official scouting mess kit and shoved it into the sea bag he was packing.

"Snakes?" she asked. "You're kidding, right?"

For a reply, he stood and reached for the sheet. She skipped off as he turned it over, then read quickly. She whimpered when she got to the sleeping bag paragraph.

"I don't… I don't… Please?" she whispered. He plucked her up and held her before his face. His fingers stroked her hair.

"Annie, you know I'd never let anything happen to you."

"Uh huh," she said. He saw her eyes welling with tears. Something about the 'great outdoors' absolutely terrified his little pet.

"Well, you should look at the last line." He held her over the paper and pointed.

"No scout," she read aloud, "den chief, den leader, leaders, counselors or staff shall bring a sylph of either gender to the camp, nor shall they allow any guest or visitor to bring one. Aside from the danger that the wilderness presents to the little creatures, their presence can be dangerously distracting and morally compromising to the scouts."

She stopped reading and tilted her head as she considered the statement. "What the hell do they mean, morally compromising?"

"And we're back," Raymond said. He placed her down and started pulling pairs of socks from a drawer. "Radio Free Annie has resumed her normal broadcast day."

"I mean, really! I'm the same person I was back when I had clothes! I'm no more of a moral compromise than any other student."

"You were a cheerleader. Mr. Descani says you had the longest legs and shortest skirt-"

"Mr. Descani overcompensates for being a faggot," she muttered. "But he can go to scout camp."

"What?"

"Nothing. Have fun earning your knot tying badge. I hear Descani has a way with restraints. I mean ropes." She smiled sweetly.

"Why are you showing so many teeth?" he asked. She shook her head. He went back to the socks.

"So, what, I spend the summer in the birdcage? Playing solitaire?" Actually, she felt pretty sure that she could talk Mom out of letting her run around the house all day. All alone. It sounded like heaven.

"No, Marilu is coming to stay."

"Marilu?"

"My cousin."

"Cousin…." she said slowly, walking across the desk. She really had to start drawing the Foster family tree. The things were like a nest of ivy covering the state of Florida.

"Denny's daughter?"

"Daughter? That's a plus," she said. "How old?" She had a repeating nightmare of being a girl's dolly, forced to play endless tea parties.

"Uh…same age as you. I guess. I think," he said.

"Um…cool?" she said. She looked forward to being with someone more like her than the kid. But they wouldn't exactly be peers any more.

------

Marilu's mom was between jobs. Her next position wasn't going to be open until the fall, but her apartment building had gone condo about the time schools had closed.

She couldn't afford the old place any more and couldn't afford a new place yet.

Family had offered spare beds and bedrooms for her three kids. She was living with them, one at a time, until she could establish a new home.

Marilu ended up with Raymond's bedroom for the summer. Denny would get the guest room every third week.

Right now, the girl sat in the living room. Her legs stretched from the sofa to the coffee table where Annie sat. They were ostensibly watching TV. But every time the sylph glanced at the glass grapes, Marilu's reflection seemed to be watching her.

"So, what's it like, being so small?" the girl asked after a while.

"It's like the whole world's ganged up on you," Annie said, turning to face the other teen.

"I know what that's like," Marilu snorted. She wasn't quite fitting in with the Foster household. Denny ran a much looser household than The Dad here would tolerate.

"Hey, at least you still have your family," Annie said. The girl's eyebrows rose and she realized she didn't want to talk about that any more. "So, how far are we from where you used to live?"

"A couple of miles, I guess." Then they were silent. Annie turned around to the TV again.

"Hey, Annie?"

"Yeah?"

"Have you ever gotten high?"

--------

Marilu's friend Selma got her brother Joey to pick the two up in his car. The girls giggled in the back seat while the slightly older male ignored them. He was being too cool to be impressed by an exotic pet. Selma was fascinated by the sylph, though, and kept asking to hold her.

Annie put up with it, not wanting to jinx the offer of grass. Joey dropped them at the curb, headed towards the mall.

She was a bit shocked at Selma's house. She was introduced to Dillon, the family's Doberman. It was her first dog since she'd shrank.

"Oh, he's a big softie," Selma assured the sylph while Dillon sniffed at her. Finally he decided she was tolerable and licked her.

"Ooooh, dog slobber!" Marilu squealed.

Annie wiped her face until she could breathe. "Just…hold me a bit higher, please?" At least they didn't own a cat.

A family room being built over the garage was half-finished. A ragged sofa sat before a folding table covered with boxes of nails and empty buckets from Kentucky Fried. Selma fished a baggie of grass from the insulation on one wall.

As they rolled the first joint, Dillon evidently regretted following them into the room. He whined and started to scratch at the door.

"Does he need to go out?" Marilu asked.

"No, he just doesn't like grass," Selma said. "When he was a puppy, he ate half of Joey's stash. He was so funny, stumbling around the patio like he was high."

"Like?" Annie asked.

"Okay, yeah, he was high," Selma shrugged. She held the joint with alligator clips and lit it. She took a hit and passed it to Marilu.

While her friend was taking her own hit, Selma pulled an empty gallon milk jug off the floor to place it on the table. "Get in," she told the sylph.

"What do you mean?" Annie asked.

"I mean, crawl inside here. I don't think you can take a hit straight off the roach. Get in." Beside Selma, Marilu was nodding encouragingly.

"Okay…." Annie said slowly. She crawled into the mouth and slid to the side. That became a slide to the bottom when Selma tipped it upright.

Marilu passed the joint back. Selma took a hit, held it, then blew the smoke into the jug. Annie flinched from some spittle then breathed in deeply.

The humans took turns blowing smoke at the sylph. She recognized the smell, but the stuff wasn't affecting her. She knew that sounded stupid. At every party she'd been to, someone had announced their resistance to something. And usually ended upon the roof, challenging the TV aerial to a fight.

But she wasn't getting high.

The others were giggling. She could see them moving around through the translucent plastic, if not clearly. And she heard Dillon whining.

"Hey, sylph," Selma called, "are you high, yet?"

"No, not really," she replied, bristling just a bit at being called 'sylph' instead of Annie.

"Huh," Marilu murmured. "Maybe your little lungs have to breathe in lots more." She leaned over and blew more smoke in.

"I don't think that's it," Annie said.

"Come on," Selma said. "I wanna see a buzzed pet try to walk around."

"Why don't you see if you can get Dillon high again?" Marilu asked her.

"Great idea!" Annie said sarcastically. Before she could point out that the Doberman wasn't a puppy any more, though, she threw up. No nausea, no discomfort of any kind, just suddenly she was heaving.

"It is a good idea," Selma agreed. She walked away. Annie stared at the stained side of the jug and tried to breathe. Outside, she heard the clink of dog tag against collar. Selma dragged the dog over against the sofa.

Annie puked twice more. She was surprised that there was anything left by the third upheaval. Whatever was happening was really cleaning her out.

Then the nausea hit. Her stomach roiled like it was on a taffy pull. She staggered against the side of the jug and curled into a ball of misery.

She heard Dillon growl, then a truly horrendous amount of barking followed. Vicious, attack dog barking. There was some screaming. The table shook and the jug tipped over.

Annie looked up and saw the little opening about a gazillion miles away. She crawled slowly towards it, desperate for some fresh air. Or any air.

The screaming stopped and the dog settled down into irregular barks. She crawled up the top of the jug and poked her head out.

She saw Dillon pass by a time or two, pacing like The Dad did sometimes. She hoped he'd ignore her, but at this point was too miserable to care. She slid out through the hole and sprawled on the table.

Dillon paused in his pacing to come over and sniff her. Then he crossed the room, barked and paced some more.

Annie curled up in the shadow of The Colonel and shivered.

----

"So I finally start to wonder where everyone is," Selma's father was saying. He stood on the porch, talking to Raymond's father on the steps.

Marilu was in the front seat of the car already. The Dad held the sylph in his hand and stroked her back.

"I get up and start looking around. I mean, I hadn't seen the boy, the girl or the dog. Usually any two of them want money or food, you know?"

"Or both," The Dad said with a laugh.

"Yeah. So, I hear this bark. I follow it to the garage, then up the stairs. I open the door, Dillon's standing in the exact center of the room, taut as a wire, barking once every 31 seconds. He's got the girls chased up into the rafters, where they're hanging on for dear life and crying.

"As soon as he sees me, he goes over to the table and brings me something. I swear, I thought he was bringing me a dead mouse like you see cats do sometimes, you know?"

"We don't have a cat," The Dad said.

"Thank the god that forsook me this afternoon," Annie moaned.

"Hush," he said.

"Well, I put my hand out and he hands me this… Little person. She holds her stomach and asks me to bury her deep because everything is so freaking loud she thinks it's the only way she'll get any rest."

"Did she now?" The Dad said. Annie belched.

"She did. Well, I get the dog out of the room. He ran and crawled under our bed and won't come out. Still hasn't. The girls came down. Slowly. Saying something about the sylph making Dillon crazy and they were innocent and the dog just hates little people and… And there on the table, they'd left the bag, the joint and the lighter."

"Hoist on their own petard, eh?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Well, thanks for calling me about Marilu. And Annie."

"Hey, thanks for coming to pick them up." They shook hands, joked a bit about what their fathers would have done, then The Dad drove off.

Annie nested in a wad of Kleenex in a cupholder. The familiar vibrations of the family car rocked her most of the way to sleep. She kept an ear cocked to the conversation, though.

"It wasn't my grass," Marilu said after about six blocks.

"Wasn't going to talk about it," he replied. "Completely different subject, though. I think you need to come to work with me in the morning."

"Work?"

"Work. We have a storeroom that really needs cleaning out. Find out what all's in there, clean, restack, all that. Should be about…" He glanced at his watch. "Let's see, your mom's got a house lined up for August?"

Marilu groaned. "Do I get paid for this work?"

"Sure. Figure after three days, you'll earn enough credit that I won't have to tell your aunt where you went today. After three more days, I won't tell Raymond why his sylph got sick. And after three weeks, you'll earn my silence when your mom asks how you've been."

"Three weeks!" Marilu screamed. "My mom'll be here before three weeks!"

"Well," The Dad drawled, "….we can maybe work out some overtime."

"You…" Whatever she was going to say, she swallowed it. Probably the smartest thing she'd done all day, Annie thought. After a couple more blocks she asked, "What about Annie?"

"Whether she was complicit or coerced, I don't really think I could expect her to get you in a head lock and force you to behave. But she is going to get punished."

------

Annie surveyed her penal habitat. The coffee table held her cot, a butter-tub toilet, chipped ice in another tub, the TV remote, half of a Pecan Sandie and a transistor radio.

"This is her punishment?" The Mom asked as she shouldered her work bag.

"Sure is," The Dad said proudly. "A gregarious girl like our little Annie? All alone for the whole day? No one to talk to, to play with…"

To put up with, Annie continued in her head. To hide from, argue with… Alone and not caged for the first time since The Day. She bit her cheek to keep from grinning.

"What's she being punished for again?"

"I promised not to tell," he said.

"She got a cookie," Marilu muttered from the door.

"Yes," Dad agreed. "But you'll noticed that there isn't a scrap of chocolate in reach." They waved and left. She listened to the door slam, the bolt slide and the garage door climb.

After it closed again, she sat patiently for a few minutes. Nothing disturbed the silence except the distant hum of the central air.

She stole across the table and leapt to the floor. She wasn't sure if anyone in the house was aware of just how high she could jump, or how far she could safely drop. Something about sylph muscle-mass ratios or muscle-skeletal arrangements worked very well in her favor.

So if they thought that the table was an isolating plateau, they were in for a surprise. To her, it was just a roomy treehouse.

She jogged across the floor towards the kitchen. She knew where the Oreos made their lair.



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