Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Mia
“There has to be a dead body in this bag.” Ruby lifted one of my duffel bags.
The party bus driver had unloaded our luggage to the sidewalk in front of our cabin.
Apparently after we’d picked up the keys at the front desk from a resort employee I didn’t recognize, that was as far as his “job description” said he had to take them.
Mindi and Rachel made scoffing sounds at him and whispered to me that I shouldn’t give him a tip. I snuck a standard twenty percent into his hands when they weren’t looking.
“Just my weighted blanket,” I said, grabbing my other duffel that held my clothes and shoes for the weekend.
“What’s that weigh?” Ruby asked.
“About twenty pounds.”
“Okay, a watermelon, then.”
“Don’t tell me that someone else brought watermelon shooters!” Mindi whined.
My sister laughed. “Nope, Mia just brought an entire watermelon in her duffel.”
Mindi looked confused. “Okay, well, I have stuff for watermelon shooters. I’ll get started on those.”
Ruby dropped the duffel onto the porch of the cabin with a thud.
I’d bought the heaviest weighted blanket I could find.
The salesperson had recommended a blanket around twelve pounds for my body weight, but nothing that had been recommended for me had ever worked, so I’d jumped right to the “big guns.” It was like a big hug that lasted all night long, and it reduced my anxiety tenfold and relaxed my nervous system.
It was a lifesaver. The blanket was the only reason I got a decent night’s sleep.
“I’m not carrying this up the stairs.” My sister breathed heavily, resting her hands on her thighs.
“Do I have to pull the bachelorette card?” I asked. “You are the maid of honor.”
“Ugh.” Ruby grabbed the duffel and brought it into the cabin. I followed her in, while the others each claimed their own rooms.
She found the sunlit primary bedroom and hoisted the bag onto the bed. “There, princess.” I laughed, throwing the bag I was carrying next to the one with the weighted blanket. “Should I help you unpack too?”
“Isn’t that on the list of duties for the maid of honor?” I quipped.
It was somewhat of an inside joke between us.
When Archer and I had gotten engaged, Mindi had sent me a checklist of maid-of-honor “duties” from a bridal website.
She’d sent it under the guise of not wanting me to miss out on the “full experience.” Ruby had claimed it was her way of vying to be the maid of honor.
“Fine, I’ll help you,” she said. “Only so I won’t get demoted.”
We both laughed. I would never demote Ruby. She was my ride-or-die.
I unzipped my duffel and started pulling out the outfits I’d packed for the weekend. It was a mix of clothes I was comfortable in and clothes Archer had bought me for the trip.
“This is cute!” Ruby held up a sequined halter top. An Archer purchase.
“You can have it.”
“What, really?” She held it up against her body.
“Take it.” There was no way I was going to wear it. The sequins rubbing against my skin would drive me crazy.
Archer meant well. He wanted me to have whatever cute, trendy women were wearing. Even after all these years, I still couldn’t force myself to put things on my body that made me feel uncomfortable. Made my teeth hurt. Made me think of nothing else except the way they rubbed against my skin.
In college, as part of my elementary education degree, I’d taken several special education classes. One of the classes had been a general overview of the wide array of support and accommodations our students might need in the classroom.
It was in that class that I’d realized that I’d been accommodating myself my entire life without knowing what I was doing.
The socks and closed-toe shoes, the tagless shirts and non-denim shorts.
How I always had my hair tied back away from my face.
I was accommodating for the way my brain negatively received the information through the receptors on my skin.
I wasn’t a freak. I just needed support.
Accommodations. Understanding. The one thing I hadn’t gotten from my parents growing up.
So I did something else that my parents had never done for me: made an appointment with a specialist. It had been a freeing moment for me—being officially diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, or SPD.
The way I’d been feeling my entire life finally had a name.
The way I’d always felt wasn’t some flaw or inconvenience to others…
and most importantly, it wasn’t my fault.
I’d worked with the specialist to locate an occupational therapist who helped me find adjustments to my daily life that made my life more manageable, and we’d been slowly working over the years on building my tolerance to the textures that’d previously caused me so much anxiety.
At my teaching job, I’d become close with the special education teacher in the building.
Ms. Weber was patient and kind to everyone in her classroom, no matter how “troublesome” some of her students were labeled.
She was a wealth of knowledge regarding SPD, having taught for the last twenty years.
She was the one that had turned me on to weighted blankets.
Her experience gave me a lot more confidence, knowing I wasn’t alone with my SPD.
I was still picky about my clothes, and that was okay. I no longer viewed wearing shirts without tags and staying away from textures that bothered me as problems—they were accommodations.
“I’m wearing this tonight,” Ruby said, watching the shirt’s sequins reflect rainbow orbs around the room.
I moved to continue unpacking, and the sunlight from the window hit my ring, its rainbow orbs joining the sequin shirt’s dancing against the wall.
My sister looked down at my ring. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
It wasn’t the first time she had asked me. The first time she’d uttered those words had been when I’d showed her my ring. It had put a damper on the moment, but that was Ruby. She was critical but realistic.
“I’m engaged to the man of our parents’ dreams. What’s not to be sure about?” It was meant to be a joke, a jest. But there was some truth behind it.
I threw another top Archer had picked at Ruby. This one had fringe.
“That. That’s what you shouldn’t be sure about. Yeah, Mom and Dad love him, but what’s more important is that you love him.”
“I do,” I said.
“Is that what you want to say to him at the altar?” She draped the two shirts across her arm.
I pursed my lips and became very busy hanging T-shirts in my closet.
A scream echoed through the cabin. Ruby and I glanced at each other, then dashed out of the primary bedroom and down the hall.
Laura stood outside of her room, a look of disgust on her face. “There’s…there’s a spider on my pillow.”
Ruby snorted behind me.
I walked into her room and saw the culprit. A daddy longlegs sat perched on top of the white pillow on the queen-sized bed in her room. I jogged over to the bathroom, grabbing one of the paper cups stacked on the counter.
Carefully, I picked up the spider, using the cup, and walked over to the window. Laura watched from the doorway in horror.
With a practiced hand, I unclipped the screen from the window frame and reached outside, giving the cup a gentle shake. Eventually the spider wandered off the lip of the cup and onto one of the wooden logs of the cabin’s exterior.
After resecuring the screen and the window, I smiled at my friend. “There,” I said. “Crisis adverted.”
“You should’ve squished it,” Laura whined. “It’ll come back tonight and crawl into my ear. I’ll wake up with spider babies pouring out of my head.”
“Don’t be stupid—spiders aren’t going to seek out your ear to crawl into,” Ruby said from behind her.
Laura glanced at Ruby, a sour look on her face as her cheeks went rosy. “I think Mindi said something about watermelon shooters?” She walked past us and toward the kitchen, where it sounded like our other two friends were.
“Stop it, Ruby.”
“Stop what, Mia?” She knew exactly what I wanted her to stop doing.
“Don’t be mean to my friends.”
“Your friends?” Her eyebrows rose high on her forehead.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest.
“If those are your friends, and this”—Ruby held up the sequined shirt I’d given her—“is the kind of shirt your fiancé thinks you like, then I’m not sure you’ll be happy a year from now.”
“Ruby!”
She stood up and wrapped her arms around me. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop.” I half-heartedly tried to push her away with my crossed arms. “I just want what’s best for you—a life that’s going to make you happy.”
“I know.” I relaxed into her hug. She never had the best delivery, but I knew her intentions were good.
“Did I hear something about watermelon shooters?” Ruby whispered into my ear.
I laughed. “If you haven’t heard about the watermelon shooters by now, we need to get your hearing checked.”
We linked arms and turned to head to the kitchen. Watermelon shooters seemed great right about now.
“You didn’t say this place was so…rustic,” Rachel was saying. As promised, Mindi had made us all watermelon shooters.
I looked around the kitchen of the cabin.
It opened to the living room and a small eating space.
The cabin was clean, just not updated. It had a classic homey style, with embroidered pillows and linoleum floors.
All the appliances were white rather than stainless steel, but they were clean and worked fine.
“It’s been owned by the same family for four generations.” It wasn’t what I would consider rustic. But maybe to Rachel, who lived with her husband in a trendy downtown condo, it was.
“You would think one of those generations would invest in a new showerhead,” Laura said.
“Or get rid of the doilies under the lamps,” Mindi said.
I hadn’t noticed any of those things. They were just part of the charm of the cabin.
“Is the restaurant nice? How many stars does the chef have?” Rachel asked.
Ruby snorted next to me.
I willed my eyes not to roll. We had reservations at the resort’s restaurant for tonight. It wasn’t a Michelin-star restaurant. The kitchen consisted of a flat top and a couple fryer baskets.
Before I said anything I’d regret, I picked up another shot. The liquid fell down my throat before I even tasted it on my tongue.
They might’ve been high maintenance and a sometimes a bit ridiculous, but Rachel, Mindi, and Laura had always been kind to me—they’d welcomed me into Archer’s friend group without hesitation. Their significant others were Archer’s best friends. They’d be around for the rest of Archer’s and my life.
I just needed to keep Ruby’s snorts and my eye rolls under control for the rest of the weekend.