That’s not what I asked, but I don’t point that out. “What about it makes you happy?”
“When a campaign I created delivers and the restaurant sees a boost in customers. They make more money, they have proof they can trust us with their vision, and I get a pat on the back. Everyone wins.”
She shifts the conversation from work to lighter topics: our favorite TV shows, books, which Green Day album is the best––it’sAmerican Idiot, no matter how muchDookiedefined their sound, I don’t care what she says––and before I know it, it’s three-thirty in the morning.
Once she yawns thrice in the span of as many minutes, I let her go. There’s a pinch in my chest the moment her face disappears from the screen, but that’s okay. I got to gaze into her different-colored eyes for almost three hours tonight. At the end of the call, she thanked me for cheering her up, and that alone made me feel like I had wontwoprizes in my cereal box instead of just one.
I go to sleep thinking of her freckles, and the many shapes hidden inside them. She’ll be in Mapletown next weekend, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll get to be beside her for most of her trip.
I stopped believing in God once my heart stopped and my hunger for flesh became insatiable, but I’m thanking Him now for not timing her visit during my monthly rut. Luckily, that will come the following week. There’s no way to know where this thing with Lindsay will go, but being a human, I doubt she’d understand or accept the change in me that occurs every thirty days. I plan on keeping that part of myself hidden for as long as I can.
Chapter 6
LINDSAY
“Baby, I need you to fold the laundry on your bed, okay? Then I need you to get dressed. We have a lot to do before I take you to Gram’s. She wants to take you and Kayla to the diner for brunch so we can’t be late.”
“Yup yup yup,” she mumbles as she tosses a stress ball in the air and catches it as she walks.
There’s no sense of urgency in Jules this morning, and it’s driving me up the wall. It’s been that way all week while I’ve felt like a headless chicken, zooming from one room to the next trying to remember everything I planned to get done. I also can’t stop thinking about that damn chicken joke and how deeply disturbing Dominic’s take on it is.
He and I have been texting most nights, but on Tuesday, we had another phone conversation that went on for hours. I woke up exhausted but smiling. There are so many questions I have about his,ahem, condition, but it still feels too personal to broach. I can’t recall what we talked about, really, but we didn’t get off the phone until four in the morning. For about an hour, I was baking gingerbread cookies for Jules to bring to school,and he was doing laundry, so we weren’t really talking at all, just listening to each other exist. It was nice. Comforting.
This morning is the opposite of calm. I still have to finish packing, make sure Jules is packed, take out the trash, and load the dishwasher, and that doesn’t include getting myself ready to hit the road. The only step in my beauty routine that’s been completed is the vitamin C serum. I still have all the other steps and only an hour before we need to leave.
“Mom, what do you think of this lip stain?” Jules asks as she strolls into my room and puckers her lips. The shade is a deep purple, almost eggplant-colored.
“The drama! I love it,” I tell her. “How’s the folding going?”
“Ugh, I’m doing it.” She rolls her eyes as she stomps out.
“Watch that sass, cupcake. It’s bad enough you landed yourself in detention next week.” She earned that punishment by getting into a screaming match with Sadie, her nemesis, during math class, which I’m not thrilled about, but it sounds like Sadie started it when she whispered to her lemmings about Jules’s eyeliner being “mid” and “a cry for an involuntary psych hold” and Jules overheard. What I won’t tolerate, however, is her getting an attitude withme.
My hair is air-drying, and I’m doing that awkward hop one with a sturdy frame often does as I yank on the waist of my olive slim-fit pants to get them over my thick thighs.
“Hey, Mom, when you get back, can we do some more clothes shopping?” she asks, shouting from her room.
“I will not be taking requests at that volume, young lady,” I shout back.
Okay, clothes are on. Jewelry has been selected. Shoes are next to my vanity. Time for makeup, then chores. My fingers trace along my jawline as I lean close to the mirror and examine the few pimples I’m sporting, but I’m quick to shake off the desire to pick and apply a thin layer of primer––after sunscreen,of course. Then I add a subtle cat-eye with dark brown shadow using my fine-edged brush.
“Can we go shopping when you get back from Mapletown? I found some stuff at Pac Sun that I really––”
“We went shopping a couple weeks ago, didn’t we?” She’s still wearing her pajamas, and I’m wondering if she’s folded a single thing from that giant pile of clothes on her bed. “No, honey. Not until next month. We can’t be blowing money on new clothes all the time.”
“Didn’t you just make a ton of money from the sale of Nonna Penny’s house?”
The death stare my mother would give me for asking about her and Dad’s finances would probably make Jules pee herself. She has no idea how easy I am on her.
“That money is not for new clothes. It’s for your future, okay? Now go get changed. Scoot.”
When we finally make it out the door, Jules is giving me the silent treatment. She doesn’t even touch the playlist I put on in the car, or react when I crank the volume on “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica––a song I know she despises.
I pull into Mom’s driveway, relieved that the snow we got on Thursday seems to have been cleared from the pavement and the stone walkway to her front door. My sister talked her and my dad––who lives right across the street––into hiring someone to shovel all the walkable areas around their houses that the city plow doesn’t reach. My dad was stubborn at first, convinced he could still handle it, but eventually caved.
It’s nice having my parents live so close to each other. Dad kept our childhood home when they divorced, but bought Mom the two-bedroom house directly across the street when it went up for sale. Now that they’re no longer married, they’re basically best friends. Mom even gets along with Ruth, Dad’s second wife, whom he married several years ago.
“Hey,” I call when I enter the house. Jules has already run off somewhere, probably to find Kayla. “Sorry we’re late.”
