Chapter Twelve #2
Alice bursts out laughing, belatedly clamping a hand over her mouth. The Van in front of her is making pretty much the same face as the one on the wall, and Alice can’t think of anyone less likely to like cheerleading.
“You could have been a cheer prodigy,” Alice says, shaking her head in faux sadness. “What if you’ve been depriving the world of your brilliance this whole time?”
“Seems likely,” Van deadpans. “What with my immense pep and all.”
Alice snorts—which is absolutely humiliating—and Van shakes her head again, smiling this time, and even when being mocked, Van is so affectionate that Alice can’t help it.
She reaches out, resting both palms on the top of Van’s chest. Van is so tall and solid, and every time they touch Alice is surprised by how soft she is, by the give of her flesh, the way it feels like her body is trying to let Alice sink down into it, to envelop her.
“I would pay so much money to watch you lead one single solitary cheer.”
They’re standing very close together now, connected by Alice’s hands, but Van leans even closer. “You couldn’t afford me,” she whispers into Alice’s ear, and it’s both hilarious and so, so painfully intimate that Alice’s fingers flex, curling around Van’s collarbones.
“Van?” That’s Marie’s voice. Alice springs backward, and Van does too, so that by the time Marie comes around the corner they’re standing weirdly far apart.
“Hey, Mom wants you to get down the box of blankets.” Marie looks between the two of them, clearly trying to make sense of what she’s seeing. “What are you guys doing?”
“Alice found the cheerleading picture,” Van says, and her voice sounds different. Higher, maybe. Tighter.
“I had a lot of questions,” Alice adds, trying to pull Marie’s focus away from how Van won’t look anywhere near Alice.
“Oh,” Marie says with a laugh, her shoulders relaxing. “Isn’t it amazing? Come down this way, there’s one of me on my first day of soccer absolutely sobbing.”
—
Alice isn’t sure why Babs needed Van to get a box of blankets, because there are already so many on the couch that Alice can’t tell what color the fabric of the couch actually is.
She, Van, and Marie—“the kids”—have been banished to clean the already spotless living room while Babs and Aunt Sheila bang around the kitchen.
According to Babs they’re “not cooking at all,” but it kind of sounds like they’re preparing for a nuclear launch from the way they’re yelling back and forth and opening and closing what seems like every cabinet in the Portland metro area.
“Should we help?” Alice asks after one particularly loud crash, but both Van and Marie immediately shake their heads.
“This is our process,” Marie says, in what is clearly an impression of Babs.
“Dad used to complain about how loud it was, until Mom told him that if he wanted a quiet kitchen, he could cook himself,” Van says. “That shut him up pretty quick.”
“They’re literally just supposed to be putting frozen latkes from Trader Joe’s in the oven, though,” Marie says in her real voice. “No freaking idea what’s so complicated in there.”
“Women’s secrets,” Van tells Alice, using air quotes and affecting her own Babs impression. “Which I think is also the name of one of the books about getting my period she gave me when I was eleven.”
Alice chokes on a sip of water, and Marie giggles.
“Girls,” Babs calls from the kitchen, sounding so like Marie’s impression of her that Alice almost chokes again. “I’m hearing a lot of laughing and not a lot of cleaning!”
Half an hour, two extra-loud bangs, and one smoke alarm later, things have settled down somewhat.
Alice is leaning against a wall, furtively googling Chanukah facts on her phone, but she quickly clicks it off and shoves it into her pocket when Van approaches her.
Van hands her a can of sparkling water, and pulls her back into the hallway, away from everyone else.
“I wanted to run something by you,” she says, like Alice can focus on anything other than her proximity.
“I really want you to feel free to say no, okay? Like, legit no hard feelings.”
That makes Alice perk up, her curiosity slicing through her attraction just enough for her to be able to pay attention. “Okay.”
“My colleague and I are leaving Total Body PT and starting our own practice,” Van says, leaning close, like it’s a secret. “We need an office manager slash receptionist, and I was wondering if maybe you’d want to do it.”
Alice wouldn’t be surprised if her jaw has literally dropped, like a cartoon character. “You…” She swallows and tries again. “You’d want me to come work…for you? At your new physical therapy practice? To, like, single-handedly run your office?”
Something changes in Van’s face. It looks like she’s shuttering up all of her expressions, like she’s packing herself away. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I shouldn’t have assumed you’d—”
“No,” Alice interrupts, holding up a hand. “Sorry, I’m…processing.” She’s not sure why Van is closing herself off, but she wants to be crystal clear right now. “That honestly sounds fucking amazing.”
Van’s eyes clear, softening again in that way they always do when she looks at Alice, like she never wants to look at anything else. “Really?”
“Yes,” Alice says, for once able to tell the absolute truth.
Spending her days with Van and patients, with a complex workload, getting to set up the office and the systems, doing everything from scheduling to ordering to billing, always someone to talk to or a task to accomplish—it would be like the dentist job but without all the wailing toddlers.
And hopefully significantly less spit. “I’d love that. ”
“Okay,” Van says, a grin growing on her face despite what looks like her best efforts to keep it under control.
It’s like she doesn’t want to be so joyful in the middle of a business proposition but she can’t help it, and god.
Alice likes her so much. Van clears her throat, trying to pull down the corners of her lips and failing spectacularly.
“I’ll, um, circle back with details when we have them? ”
“Great,” Alice says, not bothering to be cool about it. Alice Rue may be many things, but cool is not one of them.
“Psst,” Marie hisses to them from the living room. She’s as far from the kitchen as she can get, after having been chastised twice for setting the table wrong. “C’mere.”
They walk over, Alice belatedly trying to make her face less lovestruck and quickly checking to make sure Babs and Aunt Sheila are distracted by whatever it is they’re doing with the stand mixer.
“Happy Chanukah,” Marie says, pulling three cans of beer out of the pocket of her hoodie, and a stack of cookies out from under her sleeve.
Alice decides that little sisters are very underrated.
They all crack open their cans, and Marie holds hers up.
“L’chaim,” she says, and Van says it back.
Alice tries to decide if it’s more offensive to gabble the sounds back at them or stay quiet.
She settles on staying quiet, partly out of polite religious confusion and partly because she’s still trying to get her libido under control.
She’s literally sneaking a beer with her comatose fake-boyfriend’s baby sister—Alice needs to pick a more appropriate time and place to be randy. Jesus.
“Oh my god,” Marie says, her mouth full of cookie.
She seems to like the cookies more than the beer, which makes Alice want to squeeze her and tell her a bedtime story.
She’s both so adult and still such a kid, and Alice’s affection for her throbs inside her chest, a feeling that’s entirely different from what she feels for Van but slots up next to it perfectly, like Alice has always been meant to feel it.
“Van, have you showed her the costume closet yet?”
“No,” Alice says, looking between the two of them. “Which seems absolutely unacceptable.”
“Come on,” Marie says, her eyes wide with excitement. She ditches her beer and grabs Alice’s wrist, pulling her down the hallway and up the stairs. Alice blows a kiss to little cheerleader Van, which makes the real-life Van behind her grumble in an absolutely adorable way.
Upstairs is carpeted, with two bedrooms connected by an adjoining bathroom.
The ceilings are sloped and low like Alice suspected, but it’s not cramped.
The room on the right must be Babs and her husband’s room; Marie leads them into the room on the left, what was probably one of the kids’ bedrooms but is now something of a random storage room with a small futon shoved into the corner.
Marie walks over to the closet, opens the door, and… wow.
For the second time tonight, Alice stops dead in her tracks. “That’s…a lot of glitter.”
“Girl, that’s not even the half of it,” Marie says with a grin, flicking on the light. “Step inside.”
Alice does as she’s told, and holy shiitake.
It’s a walk-in closet, not square like Nolan’s but long and narrow.
She can take probably ten steps in, and it’s positively bursting with costumes.
A full-length purple ballgown scratches at her as she walks past, a creepy mask looms down from the top shelf, there seems to be a whole Wizard of Oz section, and way too many sequined jumpsuits.
It smells musty and like that cheap polyester that most bargain costumes are made out of, mixed with rubber and face paint.
“Holy god,” Alice breathes, her brain honestly refusing to process the input from her eyes. “What the fuck is this?”
“This,” Van says, from the doorway, “is Babs’s happy place.”