Little Black Lies by Tish Cohen

mad! Instead, he gets quiet. He disappears. It doesn’t happen often, but his near silence can crack your eardrums.
    I can see now my mother was wrong about Charlie’s being unmotivated when it comes to his career. There was something in his face as he scrubbed the pan. It was fear. My father hasn’t been a janitor all these years because he’s lazy. My father is terrified to try for more. He’s convinced he is exactly where he should be, convinced if he pretends nothing is broken, it isn’t. Just like he did with my mother.
    It was early June, the sixth, to be exact, and I was sitting at my desk in my old bedroom pretending to be studying for my English test the next day. Really, I was drawing pictures of myself wearing the most spectacular prom dress ever. My first formal dress ever, for that matter. It was officially the best day of my life. Jeremy Gleason—an actual twelfth grader—stopped me on the way to health, waved me into a stairwell, and blurted out, “Wanna go to prom?”
    It was the first time I’d been asked to go anywhere with a boy, let alone prom. I wasn’t the type of girl Lundon guys even looked at, other than when they were flunking math and needed an afternoon of tutoring. Mom was going to die of excitement.
    I looked up from my doodles and sniffed the air. Something wasn’t right. The house should have been filled with the smell of my roasted chicken. You know, the kind of aroma that made you feel you were living in a real home, where sisters squabbled over bathroom time on school mornings and brothers thought the whoopee cushion was funny for the fifty-eighth time. Where a mother was there waiting for you when you got home from school with the best news ever.
    But 67 Norma Jean Drive didn’t smell like any of that. It smelled lethal, like chemical soup. I hurried down to the kitchen, stuffed my hands into oven mitts, and pulled the roasting pan out of the stove, praying the fumes weren’t coming from the chicken I’d so carefully prepared to celebrate my news. As soon as I lifted the lid, it was pretty clear what I was dealing with. Toxic chicken.
    I flipped through the recipe book to see where I’d messed up. I had washed the chicken, rubbed salt into the puckery skin. I stuffed a quartered onion into the revolting cavity—wait a minute. I touched my right index finger. No! Quickly, I spooned out what was left of the onion. Sure enough, twinkling from under the mashed onion was a hunk of blackened, once-gold metal sticking out of a melted pool of swirly black goo.
    My mood ring.
    Just then, a key jiggled in the front door. My parents were home. Quickly, I dumped my bejeweled stuffing into the trash and lifted the chicken onto a platter. I scattered a few handfuls of baby carrots onto the plate and placed it on the table I had set when I got home from school. Nothing, not even a baked mood ring, was going to ruin my big announcement.
    It was pathetic to be so excited over a prom invitation. I was fairly sure other tenth-grade girls didn’t rush home to cook a celebratory family dinner after being asked to prom.
    Dad walked into the kitchen, kissed my cheek. Then he grinned and looked from oven to chicken to me. “Did you cook it in a rubber boot again?”
    â€œNot funny. I slaved over a hot stove.”
    He sniffed the air. “Did you season it with erasers?”
    â€œRushed home from school …”
    â€œSmells a bit like fertilizer.”
    â€œPlunged my hands into a raw chicken, risking salmonella poisoning, risking death by parasite …”
    â€œOr is it toilet sanitizer?”
    â€œAll so I could announce to my adoring parents …”
    â€œIf anyone knows toilet sanitizer, it’s me.”
    â€œThat I got asked to prom!” I said with a squeal.
    Dad’s response wasn’t exactly what I’d been hoping for. “Prom? You’re only in tenth