Matilda

Silence struggled to take hold over the constant clinking of silverware against ceramic plates. Ron had said a brief prayer, which came out as more of a mocking than a devotion. Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub. The silly phrase danced around within Emily’s brain as she savored bite after bite of the cheesy chicken and crispy Brussels sprouts. Even though she and Ron had played a little bit too much with the potatoes, they were still smooth, creamy, and delicious. The spinach was perfectly tender and well salted. Being Emily’s favorite vegetable, Ron made sure that her plate had an extra scoop.

Eyeing the smudges of dirt streaked across his neck and cheeks, as well as the actively forming scratches on his forearms and the dirt beneath his nails, Betsey finished chewing her combined bite of chicken and potato, laid down her silverware, patted her lips with her napkin, then turned her head towards Tyler. “Are you ready to tell me why you went and got yourself so dirty before dinner?”

Too nervous to answer his mother’s incriminating question, Tyler stuffed his mouth with the oversized chunk of cheesy chicken and chewed slowly. Emily could sense her mother’s irritation at the lack of respect her brother has continued to show, so she once again jumped into the fire and covered for him.

“We were playing hide and seek.”

Betsey shifted her head towards Emily, keeping her eyes locked onto Tyler’s reddening face until the last moment. Now looking at her daughter to continue her explanation, Emily obliged, crossed her fingers beneath the table, and quickly fabricated a believable scenario.

“He was annoying me in the kitchen, so I bet him twenty dollars that there was no way he could successfully stay hidden from me for twenty minutes.”

“A dollar a minute,” Ron said. “That’s a handsome bet.”

“Yeah, but I don’t even have twenty dollars. Knowing how badly he wanted to take the bet, and knowing that I was never actually going to look for him, having him stay hidden was priceless.”

Tyler finally finished chewing and foolishly launched his distress at his sister, who was trying to do him a favor. “You little sh—.”

“Finish that sentence and you’ll be grounded for the rest of the month,” Betsey barked.

Tyler made the correct choice and replaced the second part of that word with a mouthful of steaming spinach. Annoyed that his sister lied to him about the twenty dollars yet relieved that clearly neither of his parents heard him say the F word, he ate the rest of his dinner in a confused state of silence, furrowing his brow anytime he caught his sister stealing victory glances.

“And what made you think it was okay to make an unfair wager with your brother?” Betsey said, compartmentalizing her children’s actions. “I didn’t raise you to behave that way.”

Emily lowered her head into her plate, upset with herself for realizing that her cover-up for her brother was now turning on her. She knew her mother’s tone well, and the tone she was using with her now told Emily that the odds of her getting into trouble were high. With Matilda and cookies on the line, she was quick to make swift and clever amends. She was dreaming about this night all week long. She was not going to let her brother, nor herself, ruin it.

“Sorry, Mom. I only meant it as a joke. Besides, he’s been acting extra annoying ever since he became a teenager.” Emily declared, putting extra emphasis on the last part.”

The table was quiet for a moment, as Emily’s words dissolved into everyone’s mind. Before Tyler could defend himself from the unexpected attack, both Betsey and Ron nodded in agreement and laughed, supporting their wise daughter.

“She’s right, Ty,” Ron said. “Just because you’re a teenager now doesn’t give you the right to be an ass and treat your family with disrespect. Is this how you act when you’re with your friends? Do they put up with your shit too? Or are they just as awful as you are?”

Tyler’s silence reinforced his father’s logic, and a verbal response was no longer needed. A simple change in his facial expression answered all his father's questions. Ron knew that Tyler’s choice in friends has never been great, especially since their move to a new town. He was repeating all of the same habitual cycles, yet with more ferocity as he was desperately trying to prove himself and find out where he fit in with his new school. Emily, on the other hand, loved the move and her new school. Her old school was small, poorly located, and filled with bullies. She was also athletic, kind, and pretty. So making friends came naturally to her.

“They're not awful,” Tyler said, unconvincingly. “They’re cool.”

“They are far from model citizens, Tyler.” Betsey said, gathering her loose silverware.

“So you think getting into fights and bullying freshman students is cool?” Ron said.

Tyler looked back and forth between his mother and father in confusion and disagreement.

“Your principal called the house.” Ron said. “Your so-called best friend, Timmy, is really making a name for himself. You should think long and hard about your future and who you want to share it with. You are who you surround yourself with. Remember that next time you hang out with your friends, and ask yourself if you think Harvard would condone such behavior.”

Betsey snorted a sharp laugh. “This path on your own doesn’t lead to Harvard, buddy.”

Nervous and frightened that his childhood dream of attending the same school as his mother was now in jeopardy of slipping away, his dependent curiosity needed to know where he was heading. “Where does it lead?”

Betsey and Ron shared a concerned look, telepathically deliberating how to answer Tyler’s question. Fortunately, their internal dilemma was yet again saved by their clever daughter, who was excitedly jogging around the dining room table, collecting everyone’s cleaned plates and empty glasses.

“It leads to the living room! To Matilda!”

Trying her best to balance the weight of four stacked plates with all of the silverware on the top plate and four stacked drinking glasses, she accepted her lack of skills and placed the glasses down. Using both hands to balance the shifty silverware, Emily made two trips in total, clearing off the entire table.

During her frenzy, Tyler struggled to lift his eyes from his folded hands. He loved his family, and he actually thought his sister was pretty cool, but after moving to a new town during the most critical time of adolescence, his frustration lashed out in ways that only led to trouble. Having to switch schools during the same year he became a teenager, Tyler’s kindness quickly faded into something darker. His previous identity as a popular, good-looking basketball player was slowly evolving into an egotistical, ugly bully.

Emily hated bullies. Which is why Matilda was one of her all-time favorite movies. Even though Matilda was a young girl, she was still a superhero to Emily. Her abundance of courage and lack of fear when coming face-to-face with overwhelming ignorance, pure evil, bullies, and unpredictable family dynamics inspired Emily to live every day of her life like Matilda. But it wasn’t easy for Emily. As she took on Matilda’s persona more and more, she reluctantly realized the hardships that came hand-in-hand with being a real-life superhero. The overwhelming responsibilities, the constant need to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and the unbreakable vow to always promote hope. Plus, Emily was pretty sure she didn’t have telekinetic powers like Matilda did, yet she did love reading, and she never gave up trying to move objects with her mind. Even though she saw it as her duty to be the best version of Matilda she could, Emily always found it much easier to pretend to be a superhero in the privacy of her sacred room and in the protection of her youthful imagination.

With the dining room table fully cleared and wiped clean of crumbs and moisture stains from the cold glasses, Emily once again preheated the oven to three hundred and fifty degrees and began breaking away the squared chunks of cookie dough. Knowing how much Tyler enjoyed eating the dough raw and sensing his frustration with himself as well as his parents, she insisted that he help her in the kitchen.

“I need a dough tester, Ty. Will you help?”

Tyler was about to mount the staircase and head to his bedroom, where he would disappear for the next twelve hours, but he found it nearly impossible to resist raw cookie dough, especially when they were filled with chocolate morsels. Rethinking his ascent to his second-floor lair, Tyler altered his course and decided to team up with his sister in the kitchen. Passing by the downstairs office, he overheard his parents distressfully murmuring about something to do with glucose. Other medical terms were used, such as insulin and A1C, but he had no idea what any of them meant, nor did he care enough to linger, so he shrugged it off and stepped into the sugary-sweet-smelling kitchen.

Slapping away his blackened fingers, Emily instructed Tyler to wash his hands before touching the raw dough squares. “Your hands are disgusting. If you want to eat any of the cookie dough, you need to wash your hands first. And not just a quick rinse. Wash them thoroughly with the bottle of Dawn beneath the sink, and make sure you scrub beneath your nails.”

Tyler contemplated his sister’s orders and toyed with the idea of defying them. But she did cover for him during dinner and was able to successfully distract their parents from handing out a punishment for cursing. He owed her, and a quick glance down at his hands reinforced his sister’s orders. His hands were gross, especially his fingernails.

Scrubbing away with the coarse yellow sponge, which was slowly turning dark brown from the dirt, Tyler acknowledged his younger sister’s efforts during dinner. “Thank you for covering for me in there. I know I haven’t been the greatest brother lately, and I definitely don’t deserve sympathy, but I appreciate you always having my back. I owe you.”

Considering how rare it was to receive an apology, especially a genuine one, Emily used her skills from drama class to overemphasize the moment in time. Gasping and dropping the two pieces of cookie dough onto the tabletop, she stumbled back and slowly turned around to face her brother, jaw open and eyes wide with shock. “Did you just apologize?”

Realizing Emily was making fun of him, he snorted his protest and flicked his dripping fingers towards her face instead of using the towel draped over the oven door to dry them. Giggling from the friendly altercation, Tyler closed in on the two packages of opened cookie dough resting on the wood table. Raising both of his hands in front of Emily’s face for final inspection, she nodded her approval and stepped aside. Breaking off two decent chunks, he jammed the raw dough into his mouth and chewed slowly, savoring every second of the sticky treat.

Banding together, Emily and Tyler filled two large baking sheets with chocolate chip cookie dough squares. The instructions on the backside of each package said to place each square two inches apart, but those were just silly guidelines written to trick children into baking fewer cookies. Emily and Tyler were smarter than that. Making sure to use every square in each package, their desired intention was to create one giant cookie per sheet. By baking them so close to one another, each square would melt into its neighbor, and by the time they were finished, each sheet would produce one giant cookie, allowing them to cut and carve out their own unique pieces.

Three beeps once again alerted Emily that the oven was ready. Picking up a sheet each, Emily and Tyler delicately stepped to the oven. Using his right hand to open the door, Tyler slid his tray in first and then stepped aside to allow Emily to insert hers. As she was sliding the tray across the hot rack, Ron questioned the two young bakers from the kitchen door. “Did you add any macadamia nuts for your mother?”

Sharing an anxious look of surprise, Emily removed her sheet and carefully placed it on top of the stove. Closing the oven door with one hand to conserve the heat, she began her journey to the pantry.

“I got it,” Tyler said, jumping in front of his sister.

Licking the chocolate off her pointer finger, Emily waited for her brother to return while her dad removed three bowls from the cupboard beside the fridge. “While you’re in there, can you grab three bags of popcorn? Two movie-theater butter and one kettle corn.”

Rummaging around the cluttered pantry for the small bag of macadamia nuts, Tyler finally found them hiding behind two cans of Italian wedding soup. Clutching the bag beneath his armpit, he used both hands to retrieve the three packets of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. Two movie-theater butter and one kettle corn. Returning to the kitchen counter, he handed his father the popcorn, then untied the elastic band clenching the bag of morsels closed. Giving the nuts to his sister, he stole one final raw chunk from the sheet before disappearing into the living room.

Plucking each nut from the bag, Emily expertly plunged three each into six of the raw squares. She knew her mother well, and she knew how she liked three nuts in her cookies. Just enough to enjoy a nut with every bite.

With the cookies slowly rising and melting into one another in the oven and the kernels popping to life in the microwave, Emily raced upstairs to her room and put on her coziest pajamas. Before heading back downstairs, she shut her eyes and focused her energy in an attempt to move the hairbrush on her nightstand with her mind. Channeling the telekinetic powers of Matilda, Emily honed in on the brush in her mind’s eye and began moving it across the pink wood. Suddenly, the beeping of the finished microwave broke her focus, forcing her to open her eyes. Peering down at the nightstand, she noticed that the brush was still in the same place when she closed her eyes. Slightly disappointed but never discouraged, she shifted the hair-infested brush across the nightstand with her hand, smiling with self-approval. No one needed to know she failed.

At the bottom of the staircase, Emily heard her mother speaking to someone on the other side of the office door. She knew it wasn’t her father because he was in the kitchen pouring the three bags of popcorn into four individual bowls, and Tyler was already lounging on the L-shaped leather couch playing a game on his iPhone, so Emily knew that her mother must be on the phone. Doing her best not to disturb the intense conversation, she quietly bounced down the short hallway and checked the cookies.

Switching the internal overhead light on, Emily stared into the chocolatey haze, using the backside of her hand to wipe away the drool pooling in the corner of her mouth. At heart, Emily wasn’t even big on sweets, but family movie night always meant cookies and popcorn. The ritual of the sacred ceremony is what was truly sweet to her, yet that wouldn’t stop her from enjoying a few cookies.

“Didn’t we teach you that it was rude to stare?” Ron said, flicking a few popped buttery kernels into his mouth.

Emily smirked, both at her father’s silly comments and at her contorted reflection in the glass oven door. “You said it was rude to stare at humans. But you never said anything about cookies.”

“It’s bad for your health.”

Laughing now, Emily whipped her head around and challenged her father. “No, it’s not.”

Popping a few more buttery, mushroom-shaped pieces of popcorn between his teeth, Ron fought back. “It’s bad for your mental health.”

Emily crossed her arms and put a slight kink in her left knee to assume a more annoyed position. “That’s ridiculous. As long as you don’t act on the temptation, staring at cookies isn’t bad for your mental health. It strengthens it.”

Ron admired Emily’s high moral compass, but he couldn’t help himself from unleashing his inner scientist. “Staring is a form of consumption, Emily. It may not be of calories, sugar, or gluten, but of light, energy, and information. Depending on what or who it is you're staring at, that same light and energy is being translated by the neurons inside your brain into critical choice-making information. If the translation is good, then you make good choices. If the information is bad, you do the opposite.”

Emily stared a long while at her father, who was now stuffing his face with large handfuls of popcorn. She pursed her lips, tightened the grip of her crossed forearms, and added weight to her kinked knee, allowing the information she was mentally receiving to translate into choices. Knowing that her father was not a scientist in any capacity, she was certain that he didn’t learn such wisdom while examining property titles in the dusty old brick courthouse downtown.

“Did you learn that in one of your Land Court memos?”

Ron nearly choked on the piece of popcorn he was chewing. Placing the bowl down onto the counter and using his fist to smack his chest, he coughed until he was able to swallow the jagged kernel. Knowing that Emily wasn’t buying it, forgetting once again how clever his daughter was, Ron backed down and waved a white flag. “Podcast.”

“Which one?” Emily asked.

With a throat cleared of hazards, and forgetting the name of the podcast, Ron picked up the bowl of popcorn and scooped another handful into his mouth. Speaking while chewing, Ron inaudibly told Emily the name of the online show.

Hearing nothing but muffled gibberish, Emily shook her head as the recurring thought of who was really parenting whom in this house crawled across the front of her brain. Watching her father slowly turn and exit the kitchen, still speaking buttered gibberish, the ding of the timer demanded Emily’s attention.

Turning the oven off, she slid two purple oven mitts onto her hands and removed the two trays of cookies. Setting them down on top of the stove for cooling, she filled the electric kettle with water, picked out her mother’s favorite bergamot as well as a hibiscus rose for herself, and then added water to the Keurig coffee maker. Plucking out two Roasted Hazelnut coffee pods from the box in the pantry, Emily prepared the movie drinks.

While the tea water boiled, Emily added two tablespoons of sugar and a splash of almond milk to one ceramic mug with the words “World’s Best Title Examiner” painted on the side, while adding three tablespoons of sugar and a much larger splash of cookie-dough creamer to the Star Wars mug. She didn’t understand how her brother could drink his coffee with so much sugar, but he was weird, so it made sense.

With both mugs of coffee filled and stirred, she set them aside and began steeping the two bags of herbal tea in separate floral mugs, adding a half-stick of honey to hers. As the liquid darkened and the steam filled her nostrils with cleansing notes of citrus and sweet vanilla, she picked up a spatula and began freeing the sheets of connected cookies from their trays. Placing them on individual, elongated serving platters, the two thin cakes of cookies finished cooling.

Pleased with her work, Emily retrieved two serving knives from a nearby drawer, four paper plates, and a stack of autumn-themed napkins and made her first trip to the living room. Setting everything down onto the mahogany tabletop, she stuck out her tongue at Tyler, who reluctantly averted his eyes from his phone to glare at her with disappointment at the delivery of plates and napkins.

“You could help me,” Emily said.

Tyler remained silent for a moment, contemplating his options, then raised both of his hands high to block out his sister’s face with his phone. Ron had disappeared from the living room, leaving the bowl of popcorn behind on the table, so she had no one to turn to. Backing down to avoid ruining the night’s main event, she rolled her tongue back into her mouth, smiled at her brother, and returned to the kitchen. Hoping that the mental image flashing in her mind of Tyler’s phone flying out of his hands and breaking against the brick fireplace would become reality.

Upon her return to the living room, Emily was saddened at the image of her lazy brother sprawled across the best spot on the couch, phone still in hand. Embodying her superhero, she brushed it off and placed the two sheets of cookies onto the center of the table. Acquiring his fragile attention, Tyler shot up, dropped his phone between the deep split of cushions, and cut himself the first piece.

Emily smiled and stared while her brother mauled the cookies. All of a sudden, Tyler started choking. The cookie in his hand fell from his fingers, exploding into crumbs on the floor, and he hunched forward as both of his hands frantically waved towards his throat. Having seen this self-inflicted stunt before, Emily continued to simply stare and smile. A moment later, a large yet painful gulp cut through the awkward silence. Breathing heavily and wincing at the pain emanating from his esophagus, Tyler shook off the near-death experience and cut himself another piece.

Confident that he was no longer in danger from himself, Emily twirled around and pounced towards the kitchen. Mid leap, Emily collided with her father, who was simultaneously stepping out of the office.

“Easy, kiddo,” Ron said as he rubbed the tip of his nose after colliding with a twirling elbow. “I don’t remember the name of the podcast. I swear.”

Muffling her laughter with both palms, Emily apologized for the accidental attack on her father. “Sorry, Dad! I didn’t mean to elbow you. I didn’t see you. I was dancing.”

“No harm done, sweetie,” Ron said, raising both arms above his head. “As long as you teach me that move.”

“Ballet tryouts have come and gone, hun,” Betsey said as she stepped out of the kitchen, balancing everyone’s drink on a large circular tray.

“I’m practicing for next year,” Ron said. “Emily is teaching me her explosive new move.”

“Do you need help, Mom?” Emily said, stretching out her arms to lighten the tray Betsey was subtly struggling to balance.

“Take you and your brother’s mugs, please. I can manage the rest.”

Emily carefully wrapped her ten fingers around each mug’s handle and lifted them clear of the tray. Ron recognized his wife's slight distress and removed his mug from the tray as well while giving her a gentle kiss on her temple. Turning on the heels of her feet, Emily led her parents into the living room, where the paused movie, lazy brother, and a nearly empty plate of chocolate chip cookies awaited them.

With all couch positions claimed and all mugs dispersed, Emily lowered the living room’s lights to dim, then cut the remaining sheet of cookies into various shapes and handed a hearty plate to her mother and father. She didn’t bother making a plate for Tyler considering he already ate half, so she finished by building herself a small cookie tower on her plate, then dissolved deep into her Taylor Swift plush blanket.

Picking up the remote controller, she hovered her thumb over the play button. “Everyone ready?”

Emily received approving slurps from both her mother and father, along with an annoyed groan from her brother—his way of saying, “Let’s get on with it already”— then pressed the small circular button adorned with a white rectangle, starting Matilda.