Chapter 4 #2
I slide her a sly smile. "I know. I've gotten to be an expert at extreme couponing."
She smiles and shakes her head. "Of course you are."
"What, I am!" I say in protest.
Her face splits into a smile. As we round a corner and go by a dollar store, she mock bows to me. "All hail the queen of penny pinching, Lady Talia."
I grin. "I'll take that praise. When you have to take on the mantle of household finances at age ten, you develop a keen sense of how money can be spent or saved."
Olivia looks thoughtful. "Yeah, I can see it. Minnie seems like a lovely person, but I don't imagine that she is particularly spectacular with money."
I snort. "Spectacularly bad, maybe. Or rather, it isn't that she is even bad with it. It's more like she gives it away when she doesn't even have anything to give. It's a little frustrating." I scrunch up my face. "Not that I am complaining about her being charitable, I guess. She did adopt me."
Olivia frowns and puts her hand out, shielding me from walking into the street.
We stop, and a police officer runs by, clearing the street I was about to step into.
He steps closer to me, looking to his right.
Glancing down the street, I am able to get a glimpse of the beginnings of a large black hearse.
The cop runs ahead to the next intersection, and the procession of vehicles approaches.
I can see from here that all the vehicles following the hearse are limousines, each one long and black, with their windows tinted so that I can't make heads or tails of who is inside.
My mouth pulls to the side, as I am temporarily distracted.
I can tell by the niceness of the hearse that the funeral procession is heading up toward the nicer cemetery, up by the Morgan estate that looks down on the town.
Everybody else has to be buried in the same place, about five miles south of our little town, but not the rich people.
My mouth puckers, and I feel a wash of resentment for someone that I don't even know.
Olivia isn't distracted and continues our conversation, though.
"She's your aunt, Talia. Not a random stranger. I love Minnie as much as anyone else, but you make it sound as though she adopted some child she didn't even know." I can feel the words of protest filling up my chest. I peer down the road, not sure what we are stopped for.
This is an old argument between Olivia and I, nothing new. We are not about to cover any new ground right now if we bicker.
"Hey, can I ask you to change the subject again?"
Olivia looks surprised, but she just shrugs. "Sure. What do you want to talk about?" Then she gets a mischievous smile on her face. "Maybe about going back to the Raven’s Head Club?"
My entire face turns bright pink. I look at her and wish that I hadn't ever been so loose with my emotions and with my body. That's one way to say it, at least.
"I think I still have a hangover from drinking all that alcohol. Can you have a hangover for a month?"
She grands. "Maybe. Or maybe you're experiencing withdrawals from the really wild sex that you had that night."
"Olivia! I didn't tell you any of the details because I didn't want you to get any ideas about having another night out like that one."
"No, but you did say that you lost your v-card. When I found you the next morning, you were still wearing your same clothes. I asked what you had been doing, and you went bright pink and couldn't meet my eyes. We've been friends for long enough that I know exactly what that means."
In order to appear as prim as possible, I fold my hands just below my waist. "For your information, I think I was more drunk than I should've been. And you didn't say anything when I left the place with Burn."
"Should I have?" Olivia frowns and sticks her hands in her pockets.
"No, I mean not exactly. I certainly had fun. And he was... very attractive. But it's not a chapter of my life that I am particularly proud of, nor one I care to repeat."
Olivia bleats out a laugh. "Sorry. It's just, if you'd asked me what I thought you felt about that night, I would have repeated that exact line. She had fun, but she doesn't care to revisit the experience."
I sigh, thinking of Burn's blue-green gaze. It was mesmerizing, almost more intoxicating than the alcohol. And I really let it all hang out when I was with him, as they say. It was very unlike me.
I straighten my coat, feeling rather embarrassed over the whole thing.
Olivia puts her arm around me, hugging me. "Come on. You had fun. No harm was done. Condoms were used. Everyone got what they wanted out of the night."
"Condoms?" I give her a look.
"Yeah. Condoms. Burn seems like the kind of guy that gets around and doesn't worry about protection too much." She pauses, a question in the air between us. "Please tell me that you were safe."
My cheeks couldn't be more red. "Well, no. I honestly didn't even think about it. Do you think I have anything to worry about?"
Olivia comes to my rescue fairly quickly. "Surely not. I'm just saying, you know, for the future, make sure you use condoms. You don't want to end up carrying some stranger's baby or anything."
"Can you imagine?" I say with a laugh. "I mean, how would I even go about finding a random guy that I got super drunk with and did the nasty with? It’s laughable."
"I don't even know. You have always been such a good girl in comparison with literally everyone else. It would be surprising, to say the least."
I blow out a breath.
"Well, it's the first and the last time that we ever have to go down that specific road. After all, you only lose your virginity once. It’s more than okay for you to have gone out and gotten your jollies, but I think the Ravens Head is not exactly the scene you want to hang out at."
"Definitely not. It was thrilling for one night. But I don't think it will be an everyday thing for me. Even if I didn't pay for a single drink all night."
Olivia grins. "Yeah well." She comes to a street corner and then pauses, looking both ways. "I have to go to the public library. They have a book on hold for me. Should I come by the store later?"
"Yeah. I just found a DVD player at the dollar store and I have a pile of old Fawlty Towers DVDs. So that's what I'll be doing all night tonight."
“Sounds thrilling. Tell Minnie I said hi, will you?”
She gives me a tiny hug and then heads off. I turn and walk the remaining two blocks, stopping just outside the book shop.
I slow to a stop, realizing that Aunt Minnie has started changing the display.
Currently, there are red, green, silver, and navy gift boxes sketched onto the glass with erasable glass markers.
Gold marker urges people to buy their holiday gifts inside the store, the beautifully decorated font swirling off to blend in with the ribbons decorating the packages, the contrasting colors looking very neat.
Aunt Minnie spent hours on the design, carefully blending and smudging her drawings until they looked practically lifelike.
Now, she’s added a new element to the design.
Behind the glass window, there are many gift-wrapped packages on our table, enticing customers to enter the store.
Next to it is a stack of all sizes of books, each carefully wrapped in brown paper.
The large hand lettered sign next to the stack encourages customers to buy a mystery date with books they don't yet know.
I smile. Aunt Minnie isn’t here, yet her touch is undeniable.
I hold the door open to the shop, and immediately I'm engulfed by the smell of old and new books.
It's cold in the store—barely warmer than outside—but I start smiling the second I enter anyway.
Bookcases line the walls of this room and the one beyond, floor to ceiling, stuffed with books.
There are books absolutely everywhere, overflowing the aisles, stacked in cascading piles placed precariously everywhere you can see.
It's a barely contained world of chaos and a good representation of what’s in Minnie's brain. I like to imagine that I am inside her thoughts when I dust a high corner or gently reorganize a pile of books. I can't seem to figure out what system Aunt Minnie uses when putting them together.
This is Minnie’s world. This is all her doing.
I carefully make my way to the cash register at the front of the store.
Aunt Minnie pops up from behind the counter, her gray hair looking more disheveled and completely uncombed than usual.
Her dark purple velvet muumuu is obviously in the way because she picks it up from the floor and shows off her thin, sharp knees as she kicks free of whatever is entrapping her feet.
She mouths something as I come up behind her.
"Damn drapes."
Sure enough, there is a huge pile of black velvet drapes sitting on the floor behind the counter. I unintentionally startle her as I try to suss out what the situation is.
"Doing all right there, Aunt Minnie?"
She practically jumps out of her skin. She turns her head to face me, clutching her heart. "Oh! Oh, Talia. I didn't see you there. I was just trying to straighten out these drapes that I found. Would you believe that the elementary school is just giving them away?"
My lips twitch. "Do you have something in mind for them?"
She puts her hands on her hips, dragging a hand through her long gray hair. "Not yet. But I'll think of something."
Of that, I have no doubt. I slide past her and look at the stack of boxes immediately in front of the cash register. "What are those?"
She bends down and bungles the heavy cloth in her arms, picking them up with a groan. "Oh, those are the books that the Morgan family ordered. Apparently, they made a mistake and ordered them twice, so they won't be needing those twelve hundred copies of "The Night Before Christmas."