Chapter Seventeen

Parker

“Can I come in?”

I winced slightly at my own timidity. Great, now they were going to think that I was scared of them or something. Which wasn’t entirely fictional at that point. I knew that by the end of my trip here, my nails were going to be bitten down to nearly nothing. It was an embarrassing thing to have evidence of your own nervousness displayed on your hands in your jagged, bitten down fingernails for all to see. But hey, at least they make good weapons of defense.

I had been abandoned again, that much was obvious anyway. I had been there less than twenty-four hours (hell, less than twelve) and already I had the worst feeling that I was bad company. Taylor had left the guestroom while I was still setting things up. I had expected him to come back, but he never showed. It was kind of like in those movies where the characters wait and wait for something to happen, but it never does. I almost resorted to putting the first tally mark on the wall. I still couldn’t get it out of my head that the guestroom in the Hanson house resembled a room in a mental hospital just a little too closely. Even with all of my stuff in it. Having my possessions present just made me feel more like a resident of the mental hospital than anything else.

Luckily (or what I thought was rather lucky at the time), Isaac had come to my rescue. It took me a few tries to locate the room Taylor had shown me, the bedroom that he shared with Isaac and Zac, and when I had, Isaac was the only one inside, strumming his guitar while sitting on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed.

Quickly apologizing, I had turned to go, but he called me back in and I sat on the floor and listened to him play and we shot the shit for a while. It wasn’t that bad by any means. He just seemed very distant while I was talking to him and seemed more interested in staring out the window than looking at me.

About forty-five minutes later, Taylor had magically reappeared and we had all filed down to dinner. I had never been in a more crowded dining room in all my life. Somehow, I had expected something like a card table set up for the littler kids to sit at while we ate, but what I was actually met with was one long table with each and every person present in the house squeezed at it like sardines. I sat down to find a complete lack of elbow room and the noise was like that of a cafeteria with all the conversations going on at once. As I ate, I thought about the kitchen in my own home where usually only Gina and I sat (accompanied occasionally by Lyle) at a little table across from each other and began to get claustrophobic. I hoped this wasn’t what it was like every night.

After helping to clear the table, Taylor once again disappeared and Isaac began doing the dishes by himself. I had offered to help, but he suggested calling Gina instead and that’s what I decided to do.

There wasn’t a whole lot to say between me and Gina, partly because I had a hard time hearing her due to the noise in the kitchen of Isaac doing the dishes. Just a couple reassurances that I had gotten there all right, that I hadn’t thrown up on the plane (we had a bet going) and I wasn’t having any major problems so far. Needless to say, I wasn’t going into very much detail. As we were talking, Taylor entered and left the kitchen within the span of about five minutes. Zac went in shortly after Taylor left.

As Gina hung up on her end, Zac came stalking out of the kitchen, practically mowing me over in the process. Bewildered, I entered into the kitchen where Isaac was solemnly doing the dishes, a frown on his face so deep that if he’d been standing on his head, it would have been one of the brightest smiles in the world. Quietly, I hung up the phone and tried to decide what to do next since Taylor was once again nowhere to be seen.

“Taylor went upstairs, I think,” Isaac told me from the sink.

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

I climbed the stairs and stood in the hallway for a minute, playing eenie-meenie-minee-mo with the doors, trying to decide which one led to the room I could hear the murmured conversation of Zac and Taylor coming from. Finally, I decided on one and knocked on it.

“What’s the secret password?” Zac called from inside after a moment’s hesitation.

I smiled, hoping he was joking.

“Uh...Hanson sucks?” I guessed.

I heard his laughter from the inside.

“Close,” he said.

I paused for a minute.

“How ‘bout Theresa likes you and if you don’t let me in I’ll tell her all the embarrassing things I learn about you here when I get home,” I tried again.

“That’s more than one word,” Taylor called back.

“Wait a minute...,” I heard Zac say simultaneously. “Theresa likes me? Your Theresa?”

“Maybe,” I said back.

The door quickly opened.

“Your Theresa?” he repeated.

“There’s nothing mine about her,” I told him.

“Oh,” he said. “I always thought you two were in the girlfriend/boyfriend situation.”

“No, we’re just friends,” I said, surprised to hear myself say it. I stil couldn’t believe that I now considered myself the friend of Gina’s annoying friend’s daughter. Annoying daughter, as I had thought only a few weeks before.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“Zac, let him in before you start interrogating him on his female friends and whether or not you’re tall enough to kiss them without having to stand on a box,” Taylor said from within the room.

Zac turned to glare at Taylor before letting me all the way into the room.

“I have her phone number with me. Maybe I’ll give her a call some time and let you talk to her,” I said to him as he closed the door behind me.

“Whatever,” he said, shrugging.

There was a short pause before Taylor spoke up.

“She likes Zac?” he said, sounding bewildered.

“I guess so. Don’t ask me why,” I said, holding up my hands.

“Who knew Zac could attract the cute, older women,” Taylor said.

“At least I don’t attract the cute, older men,” Zac said.

I burst out laughing at that comment.

“I wouldn’t laugh Parker. We look exactly alike,” Taylor said from the bed.

“Oh but we don’t, my dear identical twin brother for everyone knows I am the far better looking of the two of us,” I said. “And that I’ve never had a man open a door for me thinking I was a girl.” I had learned much from Theresa.

“Hey, at least he thought I was pretty enough to open a door for,” Taylor pointed out.

“Maybe he felt sorry for you because you were too ugly to have very many people open doors for you,” Zac said back.

“Yeah, that’s probably it,” Taylor said. “I can’t imagine anyone thinking that I’m a very good looking girl.”

“I take it you never saw that episode of Teen Angel back when it was still on,” I said back.

“No....Why?” he said.

“Never mind. It’s just as much an insult to me as it is you,” I said, pulling up a patch of floor and sitting down on it. I pointed to the rather large pile of dirty clothes in the middle of the room. “Did you guys do this special for me or is this a permanent resident of your bedroom?”

“Permanent resident,” Zac told me. “Laundry days have become pretty sporadic around here. I guess you get used to dirty clothes when you spend all your time on a tour bus without a washing machine.”

“I see,” I said. Then I looked at Taylor. “So where have you been all day?”

“Oh, uh, downstairs helping with dinner,” he said. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to forget about you like that.”

“It’s okay. I’m an only child, I’m used to being by myself,” I said back, thinking about that statement only after I said it. Only child? Was that right anymore?

“So how’d you like dinner at the Hanson house?” Zac asked me with a wry smile.

“I think hectic might be the best word for it,” I said back. “But the food was good.”

“Yes, you caught our mother on one of her good nights,” Zac said.

“And Annie wasn’t allowed to do very much,” Taylor added.

I nodded, picturing the pixie-like woman at her place at the dinner table. She looked about as uncomfortable as I did but I couldn’t help but think that it was for different reasons. At least people were trying to make conversation with me. Everyone but her husband seemed to be pretending she wasn’t there.

“She looked lonely at dinner tonight,” I said.

“Who? Mom?”

“No, Annie,” I said. “No one was talking to her. I felt bad.”

“She’s not much of a conversationalist at the dinner table anyway,” Taylor said.

I nodded, deciding not to mention the utterly lost look she had on her face while she ate.

“Why didn’t you try to talk to her?” he asked.

I stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m not all that talented at talking to complete strangers at a claustophobic dinner table,” I said.

“Oh,” he replied. “Don’t worry, you’ll get to know her. She’s actually pretty cool to talk to.”

“She seemed nervous,” I said.

“About what?”

I sighed, getting frustrated.

“I don’t know. About having no one talking to her,” I said.

“Oh. Well I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Taylor said back with a shrug of his shoulders. “Like I said, she’s not one for talking at the dinner table.”

I almost pointed out that there was a rather large difference between not talking at the dinner table and outright pretending that the person wasn’t there, but I bit my tongue, knowing the subject would get me nowhere.

There was a long silence.

“Did I interrupt something when I came in here?” I asked finally.

Zac and Taylor exchanged a glance that told me that I had but that they weren’t about to tell me so.

“No,” Zac said innocently. “How’s Gina? You didn’t really talk to her for very long.”

“She’s fine,” I said. “She was getting ready for a date with Lyle so she was kind of in a rush. She was just glad to hear that I got here all right and didn’t throw up on the plane.”

“Oh,” Zac said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s...good.”

“Better than you,” Taylor said. Then, looking at me. “He gets sick every time. And I mean every time. We all give him our airsick bags in anticipation of it every time we get on a plane.”

“Once I used all of them, too,” Zac said without pride. “But I think I had the flu that time or something.”

“Yeah and you gave it to me afterwards,” Taylor said.

“Yeah,” Zac said, laughing a little bit. “That was funny. Tay can’t handle being sick. You should see him. He’s the most miserable whiny sick person I can think of. Even Jessica and Avery aren’t as whiny as he is when he’s sick.”

I laughed even though I knew I was the same way.

“So are you really going to tell Theresa embarrassing things about me?” Zac asked a minute later, his voice actually somewhat worried.

“Probably not anything she doesn’t know already,” I replied. “She is, after all, the biggest Hanson fan I know. Especially after all this.”

“Is that why she seemed to like you so much?” Taylor asked.

“Huh?”

“She seemed to like you an awful lot. Well, that is, when we got...you know, switched. She was awfully friendly,” he said.

“Hadn’t noticed,” I said, looking down at my hands because I knew I was turning red. “Anyway, at least the people who met you didn’t nearly scare you to death when you got out of the bathroom. I swear, I’ll never go in a public bathroom again.”

“Why? What happened?”

I gave Zac a mock dirty look.

“Your lovely little brother here covered my mouth and told me to be very quiet because he was hunting rabbits,” I said.

Taylor burst out laughing. Zac turned a little red, but started laughing too.

“Ah yes, my first introduction to the Hanson family. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that that’s who it was until we were backstage and it dawned upon me who I was with. I thought I was being abducted the whole time I was dragged there.”

“You thought you were being abducted?” Taylor said. “You weren’t the one putting on the concert that night.”

“But I was the one who looked like the one putting on a concert that night who ended up more or less putting on a concert that night anyway,” I said.

“You put on a concert?” Zac said. “Was this before or after you passed out on stage?”

“I said more or less,” I reminded him.

“Should’ve said not at all,” Zac replied. “You scared the crap out of the audience, that’s for sure. And me. I thought you were dead at first.”

“Dead?” Taylor said.

“Well, it’s generally the first thought that passes through a person’s mind when their brother’s been acting funny all day and then practically crumples on stage.”

“I didn’t crumple,” I said defensively. “I gracefully fell into the arms of the backup musician behind me.”

“Sure. Whatever,” Zac said.

We bantered on like that for what seemed like hours before Mrs. Hanson came in to warn us that she had put the little ones to bed and that we needed to be quieter now. We agreed and within an hour of that, I was asleep myself. I didn’t even think to wonder why Isaac never entered the room that night while we were in there.

Does anyone else sense a love trianngle coming on?
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Eighteen