Our house seems big from the outside, but not when you realize that at one time all seven of us lived here. Yes, seven. Mum, Dad, my oldest sister Abbie, the two boys Cillian and Patrick, Joanne and then me. People always ask me what it’s like having so many siblings, unaware that there’s fifteen years between me and Abbie, thirteen years between me and Cillian, ten between me and Patrick, and seven between me and Jo. It’s more like having a load of parents.
“Hey,” calls Jo from the kitchen. She’s baking. It’s something she’s into at the moment. She broke up with her girlfriend a couple of months ago and is living with us while she finishes her Master’s degree. I really don’t want them to get back together, although Mum thinks it could be on the cards. It’s so boring when it’s just me and Mum and Dad.
“Hey, you’re home early,” I respond, dropping my bag in the hall and making my way into the kitchen. “What are you making?”
“Ugh, there was some mad Christian protest happening right outside the library window, so I came home.” She sucks a little bit of batter off her finger. “Pistachio and almond blondies.”
“God. What were they protesting? And why do you always have to bake things that taste like salt?”
“They’re not salty,” she says, crushing the nuts up with the end of a wine bottle. She’s always despairing that there’s no proper equipment in this house, but with five kids and a career, Mum could never really be bothered. “They’re savoury. And they were protesting about the Kate O’Brien exhibition, saying the taxpayer shouldn’t pay for art about queer people. As if there would be any good art left.”
She cups her palms and scoops the nuts into a mug. “How was in-school suspension?”
“It was … fine.”
“Did you apologize to Mr Bernard, like I told you to?”
“No.”
“Maeve!”
“It didn’t hit him!”
“That’s not the point. You should at least apologize for acting up all the time and purposefully disrupting his class.”
I hate that. Acting up. Why are people always in a hurry to categorize you being funny as you being a sociopath? When a girl is quiet, they just say: “She’s quiet. It’s her personality.” If she’s a massive overachiever, they just say she’s ambitious. They don’t question it. Jo was so completely anal about school that she gave herself stress-induced psoriasis during her Leaving Cert, and all anyone had to say was that she was goal-orientated.
“And anyway,” she says, sprinkling the mug of nuts into her blondie mixture, “I don’t see why you find languages so hard. You’re verbal enough. You just have to memorize the right verbs in the important tenses. Everything else is simple.”
Just? You just have to memorize them?
Does she not realize how impossible that is?
And yet, other people do it. All the other girls I hang around with got at least eighteen or nineteen out of twenty in the last vocab test, while I struggled to make it past ten.
Just before I started at St Bernadette’s, Mum took me to a special examiner to see if I was dyslexic. I think everyone was really hoping that I was.
“I just know she has some hidden gifts,” Mum told the examiner, trying to convince herself as much as him. “She was the earliest to speak of all my kids. She was talking at eleven months. Complete sentences.”
They wanted an explanation for my underachievement. Especially the boys, who are both so science-y. They called up every day with new theories on why I was falling behind so much. “Have we considered that it might be her hearing?” Cillian suggested one weekend when he was home. “Maybe she can’t actually hear what the teacher is saying.”
Ironic, seeing as the only reason I know he said this was because I overheard him from the next room.
I’m not dyslexic, or blind, or deaf. Unfortunately for everyone, I’m just thick.
I lick my finger and start dabbing the worktop, picking up crumbs of pistachio and putting them in my mouth.
“Maeve. Gross. Stop. I don’t want your spit in these blondies.”
“Why? Who are they for?”
“No one. God, do I need an occasion to not want spitty blondies?”
“They’re for Sarra, aren’t they?” I say, needling her. “You’re meeting up with Sarra.”
“Shut up,” she says, sweeping the nut crumbs into her hand and then folding them into her mixing bowl with a wooden spoon.
“You are!” I say, triumphant. “Well, don’t expect her to appreciate them. She’ll probably say she loves them and then cheat on them with some brownies.”
Joanne stops mixing. Her face is going red. Oh God, I’ve done it now. Sometimes I forget that, even though we’ve all known about the cheating for so long that it feels like old news, Joanne still relives it every day. I might be over her being cheated on, but she certainly isn’t.
“Hey,” I say. If I can make her laugh, then we can both have a giggle about it, and Sarra’s memory will be thrown over our shoulders like lucky salt. “Brownies are horrible. Probably the most overrated baked good in the world. And slutty, too.”
Joanne says nothing, and just spoons the mixture into her baking tray.
“If you like brownies you’re probably an asshole,” I try again, watching her guide her tray into the oven.
“Jesus Christ, Maeve, will you just leave it?”
Suddenly she’s shouting, so angry that she loses her concentration and burns her forearm on the side of the
