Chapter 2
two
don’t look a gift horse in the butthole
My grandmother’s house is a strange place.
From the front, it looks like just another house along the street that has been converted into a shop, which it is.
Gram used to run a small consignment shop at the front until a few years ago, when my mother took it over with Ink apparently, I wasn’t allowed to call him that, only she was.
That’s when I learned what half-sister meant—a label I’ve never quite been comfortable with. Just like most of them, I suppose.
“You’d be surprised,” Gram says with a knowing nod, though she’s staring down at her gnocchi, repositioning the chopsticks in her hand. “Men are fools.”
“Yeah, really flattering to hear that any guy who wants to see me shirtless is a fool, Gram.” I stab my fork into the slab of chicken on my plate so hard that herb-infused butter squirts out at me and I curse under my breath.
“All I’m saying is you could draw tits on a watermelon, and they’d want to see it shirtless,” Gram adds.
I glance over at my mother, who doesn’t seem bothered by this conversation either. “How many glasses has she had?”
“Two, I think.” Mom is barely paying attention as she inspects one of her sprouts closely, like it has personally wronged her in some way.
“Did I tell you what happened to Victory today?” I say in an attempt to change the subject away from watermelons.
“Now that’s someone who could make a lot of money going shirtless,” Gram says absently. She pops a gnocchi into her mouth that she accidentally skewered with the chopstick. That’s one way of doing it, I guess.
“No,” Mom says to me, ignoring my grandmother entirely. “I don’t believe you did.”
“Well, you know Pal who works at Reggie’s?”
“The one with the blue hair?”
“Yeah! They actually asked Victory out to dinner when we went over there,” I tell her excitedly. “Vic’s been low-key stalking them at the shop for months, and I finally convinced her to just say something to them, and they—”
A loud clatter outside the window startles us all, and Gram goes over to open the blinds and check. Mom and I aren’t concerned, though, because it’s obviously just—
“Bitte!” Gram says, sliding open the window and popping out the screen enough for a grey cat to squeeze in and sit on the inner windowsill patiently. “Is Danke not with you today?”
“You have to stop feeding the cats,” Mom tells her. “You’re allergic.”
“But if I don’t feed them, who will?” Gram calls back to her, already on her way to the kitchen to get the cat food she keeps on hand, despite the fact that she doesn’t actually have a cat.
“Literally everyone on this block feeds them, Gram,” I point out when she returns. “Those cats are freaking royalty. They aren’t going without.”
“Mom, you’re going to get hives again,” my mother says, getting up and skirting around the table to help, so that Gram doesn’t end up touching the cat by accident—or on purpose, since she has a tendency to try to pet the cats without us noticing. And then gets hives.
I keep eating my chicken, as if we don’t have a royal guest in our company, until Bitte leaves and Mom and Gram wash up and return to the table.
“Sorry,” Mom says to me, shuffling her chair as she gets seated. “What were you saying?”
“Uh…” I have no idea anymore.
“Oh!” And she’s already forgotten as well. “I wanted to ask if you’re still up for minding the front of the shop on Monday morning while I have my eye appointment.”
“I told you I would,” I say, taking a sip of my one glass of wine. I don’t even like wine that much, but it makes me feel grown-up to pretend that I do. Even at twenty-six, it’s one of the few things in my life that does.
“I know, but you usually don’t work mornings, and I’m just making sure you didn’t forget and plan to do something else.”
“I never have anything to do.”
“I know,” she says, and I stare at my chicken, telling myself that it isn’t the saddest statement ever.
Mom is like me, in that way. We’re homebodies. Our social lives in the Before Times were just about as nonexistent as afterwards—lockdowns basically had no effect on us. Besides my weekly coffee date with Victory nowadays, I hardly go anywhere.
Gram, however, is a different story. She’s friends with every person she’s ever met and has events and meetings and functions every week.
I’m not entirely sure that we’re related, except for the fact that I know I want to be exactly like her in fifty years: feeding cats that aren’t even mine and matching my eyeshadow to my blouse every day, with curly silver hair piled on my head like a tornado swept in and I don’t give a fuck.
The only difference is that Gram actually dates and I, well, don’t.
“I guess that means you don’t have any plans tonight either?” There’s a hint of hopefulness in Mom’s voice that has me wary.
“I’m pretty tired, actually,” I say, before she can rope me into watching Enola Holmes for the third weekend in a row. She has a thing for Henry Cavill. “I’m probably just going to try to catch Helmi’s stream and go to sleep early.”
“She’s the one in Finland, right?” Mom asks, and I nod.
Helmi is my first (and only) streamer friend on Play’N, because we started our cozy gaming channels around the same time.
She does hers ASMR-style, though, and they usually put me to sleep.
In a good way. She tends to stay up late in her time zone so that everything is dark and quiet when she streams, and it works out well for her North American subs trying to wind down at the end of the day.
But she also doesn’t stream on Saturdays. A fact I choose not to share with Mom right now.
Even though Helmi doesn’t stream on Saturdays, I could always pull up one of her archives if I wanted something to help me drift off tonight, but I’m not actually as tired as I claimed to Mom before coming up to my apartment.