Lucy, Chapter Two

Chapter Two

When Mr. and Mrs. Weaver had finally left for work Lucas took his computer into the bedroom they’d given him and closed the door. He needed to talk to Micah and he certainly didn’t want that killjoy Carlie hearing this conversation.

He logged back onto iChat and quickly turned his status to ‘away’ so that his mom couldn’t call him. Luckily his best friend was still online. He double clicked on his name and waited for him to accept the call. Moments later his screen was filled with the view of Micah’s grinning face in front of the backdrop of his impeccably neat room.

“Hey,” he said.

“Dude, I am in serious trouble,” Lucas told him.

“Why are you whispering?”

“I don’t want her to hear.”

“Her?”

“Yeah, Carlie, the girl I’m staying with. I think she hates my guts.”

Micah started to laugh, his big mouth stretching around rows of white teeth that opened to let the rolls of laughter out. His dark brown eyes sparkled with amusement.

“It’s not funny. They’re going to chuck me out.”

“How come?”

“They don’t think it is appropriate for me to go to an all-girls school. That, and Carlie hates me.”

“How could she hate you? She doesn’t even know you.”

“You know how girls are. They don’t need to know you to hate you.”

“Is she cute?”

“Not the way she glares at me. When she glares at me I don’t feel anything but fear.”

Micah smiled and shook his head. “So her parents are going to chuck you out?”

“Yeah, they asked the rotary lady to find a different host for me. I’m scared. What if they send me to some weird family with a nutcase kid?”

“Wait, you make it sound like Carlie is a nutcase, do you think it could get much worse?”

“She’s not a nutcase. Her hair is… interesting, but she’s not weird. It could get way worse. Her parents are really nice and their house is amazing. It’s close to a bunch of stores and they have a pool… A gorgeous, immaculately kept pool. I don’t want to go to a different family.”

“Well you’ll just have to convince them that you’re worth keeping around.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, I guess you’ll have to charm them... Wait, I’ll call Nicholas.” He leaned out of the frame and returned with his cell phone to his ear.

“Nicholas?” Why did Micah want to call Lucas’ brother? Nicholas wouldn’t know the first thing about charming anyone. “No, call Zach. It’s way late in Boston, you’ll wake Nicholas up.”

Micah pulled that quizzical look he had where one eyebrow goes up and the other one goes down. “He’s in college, he’s probably out partying.”

“Are we talking about the same Nicholas?”

Before there was a chance to respond Micah started talking into the phone. “Hey, your brother wants to know how to charm a woman... No, like a fully-grown one… Well he doesn’t really know anything about her. Just tell us what to do generally… Uh-huh… Really? They like that?”

He was writing down Nicholas’ pearls of wisdom on a post-it note.

“Okay, got it, thanks… Yep.” Micah hung up the phone and smiled.

“What did he say?”

“He says hi, and he says women love three things: Flowers, poetry and romantic dinners,” he read off his list.

That was how the plan to woo Mrs. Weaver into letting Lucas stay was hatched. Micah called his older brother Zach, who was a chef in a fancy restaurant, and got him to email some dinner recipes that Lucas might have a chance of pulling off.

Carlie was still reading at the kitchen table when he came in to check what sort of herbs her mom had in the pantry. She put her book down and fixed her evil glare on him.

“You did this on purpose didn’t you?”

Honestly, this girl scared the bejesus out of Lucas. He had never seen anyone so beautiful and yet so sinister. She had a kind of triangular-ish face that was accentuated by thick brown bangs that were just long enough to hide her eyebrows, a straight narrow nose and plump round lips. Her eyes were round (except when she glared at him and they turned into narrow slits) and a light brown color that reminded him of Micah’s older sister Grace. But Carlie’s eyes held none of the affection that Grace’s did. It was pure hatred that he saw in her eyes.

“Go on, admit it, you lied on the rotary form, you told them you were a girl on purpose.”

There was no way he was going to admit that to her. She was probably wearing a wire or something, trying to get him deported. “No I didn’t. It must have been a clerical error.”

“Clerical error,” she scoffed. “Nobody mistakes the letters ‘a’ ‘s’ for the letter ‘y’, and also mistakes the word male for female.”

“Maybe they thought you were a boy. Maybe your manish name confused them,” he retorted.

Her eyes flared and her lips pressed together. “I do not have a manish name.”

“Whatever you say Carl. I’m going to the store, do you want anything?”

“Lucy,” she said with venom. “The only thing I would like from the ‘store’ is for them to detain you there so I never have to see you again!”

She jumped up from the kitchen table and ran into her room, slamming the door behind her.

Wow. Lucas had never made a girl that angry before. He only had a brother, and although Micah had a bunch of brothers he only had one sister, Grace, who was older than them by five years and was sweet, cheerful kind of girl. When Grace got angry with Lucas she put her hands on her hips and threatened to tell his mom whatever it was he’d done to annoy her. She didn’t yell and slam doors.

He was shocked, but there wasn’t time to dwell, he had to put his plan into action.

He almost died three times on the way to the store on his bike. He kept on forgetting that they drove on the wrong side of the road here. It wasn’t so bad when he was going straight but as soon as he got to a corner he had to figure out what to do, and that’s when the trouble started. Difficulty with traffic conditions was only the cause of two near-death experiences though; the third came in the form of an enormous, steep hill that just about gave him a heart attack in the thick muggy heat.

Finally, dripping with sweat, he rounded the corner and was happy to see what he recognized as a grocery store in the place that google maps had told him it would be. He locked his bike outside and went about trying to find all of the things on his shopping list.

He was going to make roasted chicken with a sweet, tangy glaze, mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables. It took him a while but he finally found everything on his list except grape jelly. He stood looking at the jellies, which they called jams, for a long time before a store employee finally asked if she could help him to find something.

“I’m looking for grape jelly.”

“Oh, well that’d be over with the desserts love. Come and I’ll show you.”

He followed her over to the dessert aisle and she took a box off the shelf and handed it to him. “Aeroplane Jelly,” he read.

“I like it for dinner, I like it for tea, A little each day is a good recipe!” The lady sang in a cheerful, if not a little maniacal voice. “Anything else love?”

“Ah… No. Thanks,” he said carefully, hoping not to set her off again.

This didn’t look like the jelly that he was used to, but it definitely said grape jelly on the box so he used his dad’s credit card and bought it anyway. Maybe they had a grape shortage in Australia and they had to make their jelly from powder.

Back in the Weavers’ kitchen he had more than one moment of doubt while preparing the dinner. It said to preheat the oven to 350 degrees, but the Weavers’ oven only went up to 250 degrees. It was way too late in America to try and call Micah or Zach to get advice, so in the end he decided that 250 degrees would have to do, he’d just have to cook it for longer than the recipe specified.

Once he had the chicken in the oven, the potatoes boiling on the stove and all of the vegetables chopped and ready to be steamed he found a vase for the flowers and then sat down at the kitchen table and tried to write the poem.

It was hard, very hard.

Apart from a haiku in middle school, he’d never written a poem before, and certainly not one for the sole purpose of charming a woman into letting him live in her house for half a year.

It was hot in the house so he opened the windows and the big door that led out to the back patio and swimming pool to let some fresh air in.

He tried to think of things that Mrs. Weaver might like to hear, but he had no idea. He’d never had to think about making a woman happy before. The only women in his life were his mom and Micah’s mom and they were easy to keep happy. His mom was thrilled when he put his dirty laundry in the hamper instead of leaving it on the floor. Micah’s mom was ecstatic when they came home in time for dinner and she didn’t have to chase Micah down and force him to eat.

But what would make Carlie’s mom happy? What did women want?

They liked to be told they looked pretty.

He put pen to paper.

Your eyes are brown,
Like dirt on the ground,
You are very pretty,
Even though you’re a bit round.

Please let me stay,
And live in the spare room,
I promise not to tease you,
When you ride on your broom.

It took him a long time to write it and when he was done he was quite please with himself. He thought that it was complementary and a little bit humorous, but not over the top.

“Subtlety is an art.” He echoed his dad’s words to Winston, the Weavers’ dog, who sat panting expectantly by his feet, seemingly undeterred by the thick, heavy heat.

He was just writing out a neat version when he heard the garage door open. He scrambled to fold up the poem and stuff it in his pocket as the click-clack of high heels on hardwood signaled the approach of Mrs. Weaver.

“Hello Mrs. W! Did you have a good day at work?” He asked.

Mrs. Weaver was clearly taken back by his enthusiasm to see her. “Oh! Hello Lucas. Yes, I had a good afternoon, thank you.” She stood at the entry of the kitchen/dining area, dressed in a black business suit and holding a black briefcase and looking slightly bewildered.

Her nose twitched. “Do you smell smoke?”

“Smoke?” He lifted his nose into the air and inhaled. It did smell kind of like smoke. “Oh no! The chicken!”

He leapt from his seat and rushed into the kitchen. He didn’t understand, the recipe said to cook it at 350 degrees and he’d been cooking it at 250 degrees. It shouldn’t be smoking.

He flung open the oven door and thick billows of black smoke poured out into his face along with a radiating furnace-like heat. A smoke detector immediately started beeping in that horribly irritating high-pitched trill that they have (don’t ask how he knew that). He couldn’t see much through the smoke but he could see enough to know that the chicken wasn’t just smoking. It was in flames.

“What’s going on?”

Lucas looked up to see Carlie standing alongside her mother, whose hand was over her mouth and eyes were bulging in disbelief.

He didn’t know what to do. He’d never dealt with an ignited chicken before. He grabbed the oven mitts and pulled the tray it was on out of the oven.

Now he had the flaming bird out in the open, right in front of him, and he saw Winston the dog’s eyes fix on it with a focused intensity that a professional athlete would be jealous of.

He didn’t know what to do, but it was clear that the chicken didn’t belong here.

He ran through the kitchen and dining room and out the back door with Winston trailing not half a step behind him. Looking around desperately for inspiration his eyes fixed on the sparkling crystal clear waters of the pool.

He took two more steps and launched the chicken into the air.

It was a sight to behold. Bright yellow and orange flames sprung off the bird’s skin as it glided through the air in a graceful arch, leaving a trail of black putrid smoke lingering in the hot fragrant air of the Weaver’s perfectly manicured back yard.

There was a scuffle beside him and then Winston was also in the air, careening towards the blazing fire-ball, growling with a sort of deranged glee.

A dull ‘plop’ sounded when the chicken hit the water. The surface rippled elegantly for a fraction of a second before Winston hit the water, his legs splayed in a doggy super-man pose, water splashing all around his joyful form. He swam in circles around the place the chicken had fallen, sniffing the air, confused as to where his prize had gone.

The bird had sunk. There was a charred chicken lying on the bottom of the Weavers’ otherwise dazzlingly clean pool.

Stunned and more than a little frightened, he turned back to Carlie and her mom. They wore twin expressions of shock. Clearly they were unaccustomed to their guests running through the house with flaming chickens.

“I’m sorry…” he stuttered. “I… I… Are you okay?”

Mrs. Weaver’s was having a sneezing fit. She didn’t seem to be able to stop. One sneeze after another after another came out. She was bent at the waist and with one extended to the doorframe to steady herself. She stepped out of the house onto the porch and used her other hand to swat at the air in front of her face.

“Did you bring roses into the house?” Carlie asked.

“Yeah… I bought them for your mom…”

Carlie rolled her eyes. “Good one loser, she’s allergic to roses.” She turned to her mother. “Don’t worry mum, I’ll get rid of them.”

Mrs. Weaver nodded in between sneezes and Carlie disappeared into the house.

Lucas didn’t know what to do. He’d messed up everything. He stood exactly where he had been when he launched the chicken and looked at the neat pattern of bricks on the ground.

Finally, after several minutes, Mrs. Weavers sneezing seemed to settle down.

“Lucas, come out of the sun. You’ll get sunburned.”

He shuffled over towards her, under the shade of the patio awning.

“What…? I mean why…? What were you doing?”

“I was trying to cook dinner. I don’t know what went wrong, the recipe said grape jelly, but it was a powder not a spread, and then your oven didn’t go up to 350 degrees so I cooked it at 250 degrees instead, and it caught on fire...”

Mrs. Weaver’s eyebrows rose. “350 degrees? Was it an American recipe?”

“Yeah.”

“It meant 350 degrees farenheight. Our oven temperature is in degrees celcius, 350 degrees farenheight is about 175 degrees celcius.”

“Argh…” Lucas thumped himself on the forehead with his palm. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

“Why were you making dinner in the first place?”

“Micah told me to... the flowers too…”

“Micah?”

“Yeah, my best friend. He told me to try and charm you so that you wouldn’t make me go to a different family.” His voice broke with emotion and even though he was trying really hard not to cry, tears started to roll down his cheeks.

Mrs. Weaver’s expression softened and her head tilted to the side. “You were trying to charm me? You don’t want to go to a different family?”

“No. I like it here.”

A tiny smile formed on her lips. “Well, I’m not sure that you have to go…”

“But Carlie hates me.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “She can learn to live with it. She was the one who insisted that she wanted an exchange student in the first place.”

“But her school… you said she went to an all girls school, they probably won’t let me go there.”

“Hmm… Did you know that I’m a lawyer?”

He shook his head.

“I am. I’m quite a good lawyer.”

“Good for you Mrs. W. I’m really happy for you.”

She chuckled softly. “Lucas, have you ever heard of something called 'gender based discrimination?'”

He shook his head.

She smiled slyly. “Let’s just say that I’m pretty sure I wont have any difficulties getting you into Carlie’s school for the semester.”