John Jodzio - Knockout

“This is crap,” Annabelle tells her mom as they drive there. “Quit using us as pawns.”

Annabelle cut her own hair last night. The bangs are okay, but there’s a large bald spot on the top. Both she and Lily are wearing their old uniforms, their blue polo shirts and their khaki pants, but Annabelle has taken a marker and drawn a dragon on her forearm.

“Your dad made you into pawns,” their mother says. “Not me.”

Lily and Annabelle have been gone from Longwater for four months. When their parents pulled them out of school, their dad bought two old desks and an overhead projector at the Goodwill. He painted one of the walls in the apartment with chalkboard paint. He printed multiplication worksheets off the Internet. He let them read whatever they wanted to read. He taught them practical things, like how to bake sourdough bread and how to change the oil of a car.

As they drive to the school, Lily remembers when her father was new again. How he returned to live with them after five years of being gone, how he talked to their mom on the phone every night for three months convincing her to take him back. One morning, Lily woke up and their dad was standing at the stove with his mother’s pink robe wrapped around him.

“Who wants pancakes?” he asked.

Lily ran right over and hugged him, but Annabelle stood her ground until her mom pushed her across the room and into his arms.

Lily and Annabelle walk down the halls of Longwater, looking at what her old classmates have done since they left. Taped on the walls are self-portraits rendered in beans and pasta shells. In the showcase by the principal’s office there are shoe-box dioramas that depict the battles of Bunker Hill and Bull Run. Today the entire school smells like ass, which means lunch is either grilled cheese or pizza.

“Oh, you two,” their old teacher, Ms. Marcellus, says when the principal ushers them into the classroom. “I thought you two were long gone.”

The girls find they’ve lost their desks. The school supplies they left behind were shoved into a greasy paper bag and stored underneath the radiator. Ms. Marcellus hands the bag to Annabelle, scans the room for a place for them to sit.

“We’re out of desks,” she tells them. “For now you two are going to need to make your laps into desks.”

The girls don’t know how to transform a part of their body into something that it isn’t. They sit in the back of the classroom by the dead geraniums and the bin of construction paper scrap. Lily pulls her long hair in front of her eyes and twists it into thick ropes while Ms. Marcellus shows them how to divide fractions. Their pencils smell like fried chicken and they’re slick and hard to hold.

When they go outside at recess their classmates want to be reminded of how, if they aren’t twins, they are in the same grade.

“Beginning of September,” Annabelle says, pointing to herself.

“End of June,” she says, pointing to Lily.

Their mom eats meat, then she pukes meat up. Their father is a vegetarian and when he moved in they had all become vegetarians too. Now that he’s moved out, their mom eats only meat. Roasts, back bacon, turkey burgers. There aren’t any vegetables in the crisper now, only teriyaki jerky.

When their mom pukes, Lily holds her mom’s hair to keep it from falling in the toilet. She massages her neck. Today when it happens, she hears Annabelle talking on her walkie-talkie in the other room.

“My mom needs constant attention,” she tells a trucker named Jon-Jon. “And she loves drama. It’s not hard to figure out why my dad left.”

Yesterday, after she bought a pound of chuck, a butcher at the grocery store asked their mom out. His name is Jerry and while their mother doesn’t think Jerry was all that cute, he looked stable so she said yes.

“Let’s hope you two never have to compromise,” she tells them as she primps for the date. “Let’s pray that the first one you marry is the right one.”

Last night, their dad limped in and dumped his sock drawer into a duffel bag. He slid his lighter off the top of the dresser and dropped it into the pocket of his pants. Their mom sat on the couch and paged through a magazine, trying to care less.

“I brought your children back to Longwater,” she told him. “My theory is that any place you hate is the perfect place for us.”

Their dad ignored their mom. He grabbed his bag and limped downstairs to the storage space. He held his hip as he walked, cupped the bone like there was something inside there that was going to spill out. Lily and Annabelle watched as he rolled his bike into a blue van.

“When she pushed me out that window I could have fallen someplace hard and not gotten up,” he said. “Your mother doesn’t understand that. No matter what I did wrong, I didn’t deserve that.”

When Lily and Annabelle go back upstairs, they find their mom kneeling down by the toilet again. Their bathroom door broke a few months ago and now the door is a green and brown afghan. She and Annabelle watch their mom’s head bob up and down through the holes.

“It just keeps coming,” she tells them. “You’d think I would be empty but I’m not.”

It’s Easter week and Lily thinks about how she wants to have a baby named Lazarus. She likes names with z’s, names that are not common. She wonders what her life will be like in ten years. She’s ten now and when she sits on the swings on the playground and drags her feet on the ground, she wants to know what happens when you double the amount of time you’ve been on this earth. She understands she’s doubled the amount of time she’s been on this earth before, that every second is the double of some other second.

Annabelle runs over to the swings and shows Lily her hands. She has poked a stick into her palms and they’re bleeding. The other kids see the blood and crowd around.

“Let us look,” a boy named Oliver says.

“This is only for my sister to see,” Annabelle tells them. “She’s the only one who needs to know.”

Oliver grabs Annabelle’s shoulder and pulls her to face him. Annabelle kicks her knee into his gut and he doubles over.

“Anyone else?” Annabelle asks.

Their dad starts to call them regularly on Thursday nights. Annabelle will not talk to him, but Lily will. One Thursday when he calls, Lily hears someone playing the piano in the background. With the music behind his words, everything he says sounds like a sad song.

“I wish I was there,” he tells her. “I wish it wasn’t the way it was.”

This is the opposite of what their mom tells Lily and Annabelle — she tells them their father doesn’t want to be here, that he shacked up with a tramp who can’t paint and whose real name is not Fern, but Tammy. Her mother tells Lily that their father will have to live with Tammy when her tits sag and her ass flattens and her neck skin chickens and that stupid leopard-print coat of hers pills and frays.

“What’s that music in the background?” Lily asks him.

Her dad says it’s just the radio, but Lily can tell it’s not good enough. It’s off-kilter with songs that never finish. It’s too loud in some spots and too soft in others.

“It’s not the radio,” Lily tells him.

“It’s the radio,” her dad says.

For Easter dinner, Jerry brings over a glazed ham. Their mother has cleaned all day, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the hardwood floors. Lily and Annabelle run wild, in and out of the bathroom, through the blanket door.

“Outside,” their mom yells at them, “Jerry’s gotta piss.”

The girls go out on the fire escape, but instead of waiting, Annabelle heads down the stairs and past the dumpster.