It's Just a Jump to the Left Read Free

on
Lost in Space
? Dr. Smith up to his old tricks?”
    Stevie’s left hand twitched, and Leta automatically moved back. His hair had grown back straight and brown over the indent
     in his left temple where the bullet had gone in. On a clear, cold day in October, Stevie and his best friend Miguel had been
     down at the lake shooting at snapping turtles. They were just packing up to come home when the gun discharged by accident.
     In an instant, the bullet pierced Stevie’s temple and did its damage, taking a detour down into his lung where it lived still,
     a bud of metal that might bloom at any moment and kill him. Sometimes it felt like that bullet had traveled further, though.
     Like it had flown right through their family, splitting them into a before-and-after that couldn’t be put back together.
    The TV hiccupped with static.
    “Adjust,” Stevie rasped.
    Sighing, Leta trudged to the gigantic Magnavox that was so old it still had rabbit ears. She moved the antennae back and forth,
     stealing glances at the snowy TV, trying to see if the picture had sharpened.
    “Better?” Leta asked, her hands still on the antennae. Her brother’s hand twitched. “Stevie,” Leta said slowly and firmly.
     “Is the picture better now?” Sometimes she had to repeat things two or three times until Stevie understood them completely,
     and even then, he might answer with the wrong words, a sentence frustratingly out of order that you had to decipher like a
     secret code.
    Leta gave up. “You need anything else?”
    “Yes,” Stevie said, shaking his head no. “I’m the robot.”
    “Great. You’re the robot. Just what we need in this family.”
    “Robots in the house!” Stevie insisted.
    Leta’s stomach flared with a familiar, burning pain, and she took a deep breath. “Okay, then. Don’t watch too much. It’s bad
     for your eyes.”
    “You adjust, adjust,” she heard him say as she walked away.
    In the kitchen, Leta’s mom was putting the finishing touches on a casserole. It seemed to Leta that her mom had gotten older
     just since Stevie’s accident. Like someone had let a little of the air out of her, and now her features didn’t have enough
     to puff them up anymore.
    “I’m putting this in the freezer because it’s not for us,” her mother announced as if she were answering some urgent question
     on Leta’s part, which she wasn’t. “It’s for the progressive dinner at church on Friday night.”
    “I’ll call the papers.”
    Her mother turned, hands on her hips. “Was that necessary?”
    Yes, it was, Leta wanted to say. She couldn’t say why it felt so very necessary to be angry with her mother all the time,
     but it did. She would walk into a room where her mother sat reading or grading papers and be consumed with a sudden need to
     wound that would be followed moments later by a terrible guilt and an equally ferocious longing to be forgiven and comforted.
    Leta opened the fridge door and waited for something to announce itself. “Friday night is
Rocky Horror
night. It’s your turn to drive.”
    “Well, I can’t take you. Get Agnes’s dad to do it. And close the refrigerator door!”
    Leta closed it hard and her mother glared. “Mr. Tatum is going to some convention.”
    “Ask her sister. Ask Diana.”
    “They’re going to camp out for concert tickets.”
    “Well, that’s just too bad,” her mother snapped.
    “Mo-o-o-om!”
    “Cry me a river, young lady. You’ll just have to skip it this week.”
    Leta thought of Jennifer Pomhultz in her sequined baton twirler’s outfit dancing her Six Flags routine onstage, silhouetted
     by the eight-foot-tall reflection of Columbia as Tom Van Dyke stood clapping in the back, a look of love in his eyes.
    “This is important to me! Why can’t you just understand me for once?”
    Her mother slammed a bag of frozen peas onto the counter, turning it over and over to break apart the icy scar tissue connecting
     them inside. “Oh, yeah? Well, why is it