“Yes, just folding laundry, keep going.” Her voice was a little distant.
“Tell me when I’m on speaker, you brat.” She snickered, but stayed quiet. “Anyway, to give you a good idea of the social butterfly status of my man, Carter hadthree timesas many phone call minutes and messages on his phone line compared to my own.” I gleefully pointed this out to him one day when he was giving me a hard time aboutalways being on the phone.
“Okay…why are you telling this to me?” A loud chewing, crunching sound filled my headphones.Gross Lenny.
“The point is that I do not and never have hadRizz.I am the bookworm, stay at home, leave me alone for twelve hours to charge mysocial battery, introvert.” I finished putting up the dishes and returned to general tidying.
“Yeah, true.”
“Jesus, you don’t have to agree with me so easily.” I pause with a dog toy in hand.
“How many book subscriptions do you have?”
“Okay, rude…only three.” Another snicker through the phone.
“I still don’t get what you’re trying to tell me, Sis.”
Most of my friends are located all over the state and the country… even the world, but they number in the handfuls. I have plenty of people I get along with. However, I am uninterested in investing in more friends. “My social energy is used up at school Monday through Friday. The weekends, and time with my fiancé after school, work together to charge my battery for my students.”
I continued, despite her silence.
“Okay, how about this. I saw a meme once of a girl with alow batteryicon looking dejected as shit in the first panel, then she’s snuggling a man in the second panel. The third panel has her battery in the yellow, and her final panel has her battery in the green.” I grunted as I bent over to look under the couch, now returned to its normal location. “She’s just silently hugging her man, and…I get that on a cellular level.” A lone sock was under there, so I nabbed it, but remained kneeling there for a moment.“Carter is my charging port, Lenny. He’s my safe place to go to when I can’t function anywhere else anymore.”
“Okay, that is stupid cute, and I still don’t see your problem. Do you feel like you don’t see him enough right now? Can’t you go see him?”
“I…can’t just go see him.” I shrugged the discomfort away and scooted right past that topic. “Honestly, I just worry that a missing detail in the panel is the man’s battery going down as a result of being her source of comfort. Maybe that’s why it feels like he’s pulling away?”
“Becky, I…”
“He’s really holding onto that phone. I don’t think I’ve seen him put it down. We haven’t even beentogether together since that night?—”
“Becky, he lov?—”
“—and that’s not like us, and I’m starting to freak out because school is almost back on?—”
“Becks, quit.”
“—and we have even less time, and what if he’s?—”
“Stoppit, stoppit, stoppit!” My sister interrupted my word vomit loud enough to make me think she’d been trying for some time.
“Damn, Lenny, what?”
“What are you really worried about, Becky?” she asked, much quieter now. “This is Carter we’re talking about. He loves filling your social battery.”
There was no censure in her voice, but some real worry threaded through her words.
I let out a deep sigh before answering. “Then why does he keep avoiding me? What did I do? I miss him.”
Lenny was quiet for a minute before asking me, “Have you tried fitting things into the time you do have after he gets home? Fresh cooked meal?—”
“I’m a terrible cook.”
“Okay, his favorite take-out, ready for when he gets home. Do your stupid TV ritual?—”
“Barneby isnotstupid.” How dare she criticizeMidsomer Murdersthat way.
“Oh myGodstop interrupting me!” she screeched at me.
