Chapter Text
Sam Kosnowski has always known that she’s different.
Not because she doesn’t like wearing dresses and loves climbing trees, or because she dreams of being something other than a housewife; in 1974, those are rapidly becoming normal things for growing young girls to want and do. Not because she’s so good at math she’s in AP calculus at the age of fourteen, even though both of her parents barely graduated high school.
But because she’s different. She has four siblings, and all of them have dark or reddish blonde hair with blue or green eyes. They’re as tall as her mother and father – two of them lanky like her dad, the other two all leg, like their mom. Sam is short, with raven-colored hair and hazel eyes. Medically, too, she’s an anomaly - When she was seven, she had developed juvenile diabetes – something her mother didn’t have, and her Bosco-loving father had never dreamed of encountering.
That’s what made her mother finally tell her – mostly because Sam, who knew a few kids in her class had been adopted, broke down sobbing and asked her mom if she had been too. That’s how Sam learned that Lenny wasn’t her birth dad – or her ‘real’ dad, as Shelley Squiggman had once said before Sam punched the girl right in the mouth. Aunt Shirley had scolded her niece for that, and Shelley’s mother Squendolyn had tisked at the girl’s behavior. But nothing had changed the situation for Sam – Lenny wasn’t really her dad, no matter what she said or did about the situation.
Her mom gets upset whenever Sam asks questions about the guy. She barely knew him. He didn’t stick around for the important stuff. “Lenny’s your daddy. He’s the one who burped you and fed you and walked the floor with you.”
And, Sam figured out sometime later, married her mother so she wouldn’t have to deal with the disgrace of being single and knocked up. The revelation was a shock to Sam. Her parents had always seemed like the most loving people in the whole world, their marriage pristine – and clearly fruitful. That they’d ‘had’ to do it changed her whole worldview. It was like learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
And Lenny loves her – Sam knows this. He loves her as much as she loves him. He gets teary-eyed whenever she asks questions about that time. “I don’t care what nobody says. You’re my baby,” he’ll say, hugging her tight, though Sam is fourteen, fer chrissakes, and even has a training bra which she harbors ambivalent feelings about.
No one in the family has ever treated her like she was an odd duck out – but Sam knows. She’s not an outsider, but she’s alien – made of different parts. Just like David Bowie, whose face is pinned up all over the walls in her tiny Granville bedroom.
No one understands what that feels like, and she’d never tell anyone about it – except for her best friend, Thea Squiggman. Thea’s ten months younger than Sam’s brother Nunzio – twelve to Sam's fourteen. But despite the difference between them, Thea and Sam had always been like siblings, a natural pair, like Heckle and Jekyll or peas and carrots.
The short bus ride from Granville to the North Side seems interminable in the already steamy late May weather. It’s the summer – school let out last Wednesday – and Sam has a sense of purpose as the bus bumps along to its usual stop. She has to walk another block, her loaded backpack strapped over her shoulder, before making it to the Squiggman apartment.
Uncle Squiggy is in the middle of another impassioned rant, delivered to a barely-patient Aunt Shirley while the two of them clean Theodore the lobster – the Squiggman’s family pet’s – tank. Cleanliness is always an issue at the Squiggman household; Aunt Shirley believes in weekly vacuuming. Uncle Squiggy thinks that It’s not dirty until it’s crusty. After enduring fussing from the both of them, Thea meets her at the door and they hustled into her room, closing the door tight, setting ABBA on Thea’s hi fi, and putting the record player on loud.
“Why did you need to see me?” Thea asks.
Sam sits down on Thea’s rainbow-spackled bed, opens her big red backpack, and pulls out a red pencil case. “You know how my mom says she doesn’t know where my birth dad is?” Sam pulls a bit of scrap paper out of the case and shows it off. “It turns out she’s been getting support for me from him every month. She puts it in the bank, but the account’s got my name on it, so I took the cash. $200 and an address. If I want to see him, all I have to do is go there.”
Thea’s eyes bug out. “You took your mom’s money?”
“It’s my money,” Sam replies.
“Maybe so,” Thea says. “But why would you want to go see that Jim guy? He’s never bothered to talk to you!”
Sam shrugs. “Maybe my mom told him not to. You wouldn’t understand. You know who you are. You look just like your mom.”
Thea winces. “I’m sorry, Sam.”
“If you don’t want to come, you have to promise you won’t tell my mom,” Sam says, and snaps her pencil case shut. “She and dad – they wouldn’t understand either. But I just want to know what the guy looks like, y’know? I don’t plan on spending all summer in New York, but maybe if I just go there for the weekend…”
“So what do you want me to do? Say you’re having a sleepover here?”
“If you don’t want to come,” says Sam.
Thea stomped her foot. “Ugh! You know I’ve always wanted to go to New York!”
Sam grins. “And I’ve been a million times to see my great-grandma. We can stay with her, I can show you around…”
“What are you gonna tell your grandma?” says Thea.
Sam says, “To say we’re not there…”
“Sam…”
“Come on, we can have fun – we can meet people!” says Sam. “Please, Thea?”
Then Sam put on a boo-boo face. Which always gets results from her parents, but doesn’t tend to work on her best friend.
Thea relents with a sigh. “I’ll go pack. Maybe we can call Sally Butafucco, tell her to lie and say we’re at a slumber party.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea!” It didn’t take Thea long to fill up a bag – a pair of pajamas, toothpaste and a toothbrush, her hairbrush, all of the money she’d made babysitting and shoveling driveways over the past winter plus some birthday money, and three changes of clothing plus an extra pair of shoes. Sam doesn’t have much more on her back – except for her ubiquitous diabetes test strips and lancet. She’s spent her whole youth stabbing her finger and testing her blood, just to make sure her sugar’s right and though the doctor has promised her that someday she might grow out of her condition there’s been no sign that she will.
Thea pulls the needle off of her ABBA record and they head into the living room. Aunt Shirley and Uncle Squiggy are in the middle of putting Theodore into his tank.
“We’re going to Sally Buttafucco’s for a sleepover,” says Thea. “Be back Monday!”
“Wait a minute young lady,” Shirley says. “Aren’t you going to ask me something?”
“Yeah, can I have the last two Pepsis in the fridge?”
“Theresa!”
Thea winces. “I was just joking, ma, I promise.”
“Shirley, wouldya let our little moth fly?” Squiggy asks. “So what if she's twelve - we trust her to take care of her brothers and sisters when we gotta work, right? Besides, she’ll be out…and if she’s out, we can get a sitter for Heddy and Todd, and then I can run amok upon your body…” He starts massaging her shoulder, just hard enough to make her wince.
Shirley’s posture softens while Thea suppresses a dry heave. “Well, all right,” Shirley says. “But I want you home by Monday night! It may be the summertime but that’s not an excuse to be out during a weeknight. Your Uncle Bobby’s coming for a visit Tuesday and I want you here to meet him!”
“I’ll be back, I promise!” says Thea. Shirley kisses her cheek and fusses over her as she grabs the Pepsi out of the fridge and the two girls duck out into the safety of the hallway. They don’t dare talk about their plans until they’re away from the block where Sam spent her first two years, from the family restaurant her grandfather gave to her mother on his way to California – the one Sam knows she’ll be expected to take over someday. Sam has to muffle her own jealousy as Thea sucks down one of the Pepsi; she settles for the bubbler out on Seventh. Until they make it to the bus station and buy their round-trip tickets to New York they don't dare to say anything. Then she and Thea burst into giggles, relieved to have gotten away with their mischief.
They plunk a couple of dimes into a payphone and swear Sally to secrecy and duck onto the bus. Sam feels better than she has in a while. The key to who she is at her very core will soon be revealed.
“This is going to be an adventure worth writing a song about,” Thea says, as the bus pulls away from the curb. “Wait, Sam, what if our folks come looking for us?”
Sam grins and pulls off her Braves cap. Thea’s mouth snaps open and then closed wordlessly at the sight of her best friend’s short-cropped hair. “They’ll be looking for a girl with long dark hair, not a guy with a buzz cut.”
“Your mom’s gonna kill you.”
Sam shrugged. “I’ll go with a smile on my face,” she says, and wonders what she’ll see, who she’ll meet in New York, pushing the bright orange rimmed sunglasses her grandfather had sent along from California up the bridge of her nose.