Page 22 of Gorgeous Misery

But I know why.

Chek is dead.

Seventeen days.

Seventeen years old.

Chek is dead and even though she won’t let me see it, she is falling apart and it’s breaking my heart.

About an hour later, Wendy comes out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel. She doesn’t look at me. Just heads straight to the bedroom and closes the door with a quiet click.

I don’t know what to do. Leave? Stay? I don’t know what she wants, let alone what she needs.

Come on, Nick. That’s not true at all. You know exactly what she needs.

Chek.

But Chek is dead and he’s all she’s ever had.

Wendy’s door opens and she comes out wearing a faded maroon t-shirt with some bar logo printed on the front. Bayou something, which reminds me of Adam. But I don’t have time for him right now, so I push his face away in my head and focus on this girl in front of me. She’s got on a pair of cut-off shorts. Really short shorts. But they are way too big for her and so they are not the sexy kind of short shorts. They are the lazy kind of short shorts.

She’s looking for something, her eyes darting around the small room. She wanders over to the coffee table, then the side tables, then the kitchen bar.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“My brush. Have you seen my brush?”

“No.”

She goes back into her room and I can hear her opening and closing drawers. Her search is all very random. All very distracted. Like she’s looking, but not looking.

I get up, go into the bathroom and find the brush in a basket sitting on the windowsill. I come back out, holding it in the air.

She’s looking at me from across the room. Somehow, in the five seconds it took me to locate the brush, she has made it all the way back out to the couch. A good reminder of who she is.

“Sit down,” I say, using the brush to point at the couch.

I expect a huge argument over this command because that’s the kind of girl Wendy Gale is. Aggressive. Belligerent. Combative. Fighting is her one true God-given gift.

But she gives in immediately and that’s kinda sad.

I walk over, sit down to her right, then angle myself into the couch arm. She does the same, angling herself into me.

And then I begin to brush her hair.

This is something I’ve seen Chek do hundreds of times. When Wendy was little, she hated brushing her hair. I think all little girls are like that. Lauren was like that when she and I were still together. I started brushing her hair after watching Chek do Wendy’s.

It calms them. The Zero girls. They hate it and I’m not convinced that it even feels good to them the way it might to a normal girl. But it calms them anyway. Don’t ask me why, it just does.

So it calms Wendy now. She lets out a deep breath and her shoulders slump a little as she bows her head in defeat. Like she’s giving up on this day.

I am careful as I brush. Lauren was always very sensitive about me touching her head. I don’t know if this is something all little girls get weird about, or just the Zero girls, but it’s a real thing. She would cry sometimes if I wasn’t paying close attention when I was touching her scalp. Not just with a brush, but with anything. I tried to get to the bottom of this several times and she never could explain it. She told me brushing her hair hurt her in the teeth. Which was her way of explaining some weird neurological connection between the two things, I guess. The way you can touch a spot on your leg and feel it in your shoulder. Pressure points. Like Chinese medicine. But she also said it felt like bugs crawling, it gave her the shivers, it made her feel sick, and—my favorite—it made her crave ice cream.

This memory of Lauren makes me smile. I don’t think about her much. There’s no point. I’m never going to see her again and thinking about her makes me sad.

No one likes to be sad.

But anyway. Back to Wendy. She is the same about the hair. “You can’t let it get tangled,” Chek used to caution me about Lauren’s hair when she was small. “Or you’ll have to shave it off. They can’t tolerate the untangling. Put it up in braids. Keep it neat.”