Chapter 3 #2
He left me at the house and I got to work.
There was plenty to accomplish before he returned, including dealing with his neighbor who needed to pick up his machines.
I had projects for myself, too, because I knew that I didn’t look good.
Millie would have called me a hag and told me to fix my ass up, and I planned to.
By the time Callum got home, there had been a lot of changes.
For one, the garage was empty—of the ATVs.
There was still a lot of stuff around, like jars of rusty nails and screws, large puddles of oil and automotive fluids, stacks of old magazines, paint cans, and a pile of tools.
I’d found a pair of gloves and organized a little, but most of my work had been inside.
He noticed that right away when I met him in the driveway. “You look different,” he stated. He didn’t mean my flip-flops.
“I made some makeup and I worked on my hair,” I said.
I had found what had to have been his grandma’s old hot rollers and those had given me an unexpected amount of body and curl.
I had burned a bunch of matches and taken some ancient hot chocolate out of a cupboard in the kitchen.
Then I’d combined the ashes with petroleum jelly I’d discovered in his old-time first aid kit.
That made eyeliner. Next, I’d used a mixture of the jelly and cocoa powder as eye shadow.
“Do you know if the berries in the back yard are poisonous?” I asked.
“What?” He was still staring at me, looking confused.
I hoped that they weren’t, because I had crushed those for the juice and made lip and cheek stain. I needed color on my face to combat the orange of my dress. “Come see what I did,” I told him. I took his hand and pulled as I hopped back to the kitchen.
“It’s pretty empty,” he commented, but it already had been because he’d gotten rid of a lot on his own. I had discovered a plate sitting on top of one of the cabinets, though, so now we could each have our own dish.
“Sit down,” I urged, directing him to a chair. “Watch the video I made.”
“What?” he asked again. Now he stared in confusion at the phone I had left on the table. “Where did you get that?”
“Your neighbor gave it to me when he took his ATVs out of your garage. He has a cell phone business, too, and he said he can fix anything.”
“Bryan gave you a phone,” he stated, but then shook his head. “He’s usually a dick. Why did he do that?”
“I had to give him something in return. Not what you’re thinking,” I added, in case he had jumped to the idea of me sleeping with his neighbor. “It was just my foot.”
“What?” He rubbed his hand over his face. “What about it?”
“He has a foot fetish and one of mine is still looking good.” I had gotten a pedicure in Chicago before we’d left and even the woman at the nail place had commented on what nice arches and toes I had. “I put on a little show for him. Just my foot,” I reiterated. “He gave me a phone in exchange.”
“I don’t like that,” Callum stated flatly.
“I needed it. I don’t have a SIM card and there’s no Wi-Fi here, but I could still make a video. Watch.” I played it before he could say anything else.
It opened with me posing next to the closet across from the bathroom, where he’d hung my towel on the knob the night before.
“Hi guys!” video Rainey said brightly. I mouthed the words along with her.
“I’m Rainey and my boyfriend Callum Frazier and I are getting ready to head to Michigan for his Woodsmen football tryout.
But before we go, we’re cleaning out the house that used to belong to his grandparents.
I found some very interesting stuff.” Video Rainey gleefully tapped her fingers together and smiled.
The rest of it was short clips of me “discovering” various items, things I’d found around the house and in the garage and then put in that closet.
There were very old pennies from the nineteen-sixties, which I displayed in my hand.
There was a robe with a marabou collar which I modeled, vamping for the camera.
I showed the prehistoric medicine kit, a pile of very-expired chocolate bars, and a creepy doll.
“She’s going to sleep in the garage,” I told the viewers, putting it down and shivering. Lastly, I picked up an old girlie magazine—ancient porn, in other words, which I opened and then closed, covering my open mouth with my hand.
“Grandpa had that dog in him!” I announced, laughing. “Callum doesn’t need these because he gets live shows.”
I winked along with video Rainey, exaggerated and silly. On the phone, I laughed again.
“Follow along to watch us make our move and Callum make the Woodsmen team!” video me said, and blew a quick kiss. It ended there but he still sat staring at the dark screen.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Millie always set up amazing lighting but I tried my best—”
“That was really cute,” he said. He sounded shocked. “It was funny and you looked beautiful.”
I started to smile like I had in my video. “You liked it?”
“You said that I’m your boyfriend.”
“It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to people if I told the truth. It was just easier,” I explained.
“Hell,” he said, but it was a “hell” of surprise, not anger. “You really think this will help me?”
“I don’t know if anyone will watch it. It’s hard to get traction,” I answered.
“You told me before that the fans for that team are crazy devoted so I think the best shot we have is to market the channel as a Woodsmen thing. Hopefully, we’d get them talking about you and sharing the content. I wore the orange dress on purpose.”
“You don’t have anything else to wear.”
“I have the sweatshirt but I took it off,” I corrected. “I was thinking about making another video of us loading up the car. You can do this cute technique where it looks like—”
He interrupted me again. “What did you do with your foot to get this phone?”
I showed him a little and he said he had to go out for a minute. It didn’t take long at all before he returned. “Bryan’s sorry and he’s going to leave you alone. For the rest of your life,” he informed me.
“I hope you told him to watch the videos, when we get our channels going.”
“I did not,” he answered. He was back to sounding pissed off.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t think it was a big deal because it was only my foot. I won’t do it again.”
“You can do what you want,” he told me, but clearly, that wasn’t true. I couldn’t do things that upset him and just as clearly, my little show had made him furious.
“Why don’t we keep packing?” I suggested and he nodded. After a while, we were back to talking normally—normal for us in our two-day relationship, anyway. He asked me more about making videos (not foot ones) and I shared all that I knew.
“Millie was really the expert. She used to work in digital marketing for a production company before she came to be Damain’s assistant,” I explained.
“Sounds like that was a step down.”
“It was. But she didn’t have much choice because she got fired and she said that word gets around fast in Hollywood.”
“Word about what?” Callum asked.
“Her drug problem,” I stated. “She can’t go too long without a snort. But she functions really well on it, better than anyone else I’ve dealt with.”
“I can’t stand that shit,” he muttered.
We seemed close to getting into anger territory again. “Can you tell me more about Michigan?” I suggested. “About the place where the Woodsmen play? I’ve never been there.”
But he turned the questions back to me. “Where have you been? You said that you went to a lot of places with the entourage.” He still pronounced that with an accent, which was pretty funny. “You started out in Washington. What’s it like there?”
I told him about some of the places we’d visited but really, they’d all seemed the same to me.
Millie, Sage, and I had flown in coach while Damian sat in first class.
He’d liked to board immediately so that everyone on the plane would have to walk past him.
He wore big sunglasses and drank champagne, usually while talking loudly on his phone, but then he pretended not to notice when people looked his way.
I had doubted that many of them actually recognized him but if they happened to say something, he had refused to sign autographs.
Then we’d landed at another airport in another city and we’d gotten in cars to take us to another hotel where he had usually wanted me or Sage for a while.
Later, we had gone out for the night and after we’d done all that a few times, I had realized that there was nothing new in any of the suites he rented or at any of the clubs we visited.
The parties felt just the same and I had started to get confused about where we were—like I hadn’t remembered that I’d arrived in Indianapolis because the 20 Grand club looked just like two in Chicago, one before it in Minneapolis, and another we’d visited in Omaha. It was all on repeat.
“I wish I had seen more of those cities,” I said, “but I didn’t get to tour them. By the time we made it out of the hotels, it was already dark, except when I went and got a pedicure in Chicago.” We both looked at my toes and I saw Callum frown, so I moved right on.
“You asked about where I grew up. It was a really small town,” I said. “There was nothing to do.”
“It was boring?”
“Very,” I agreed. “It was so easy to get in trouble.”
“What’d you get in trouble for?” he wondered.
“You know, kid stuff. Do you want any of this?” I held up a box stuffed with transparent tights and plastic eggs.
“I guess my grandma used to wear those. I don’t think anybody would use them now,” he considered.
We had formed a big donation pile in the garage, away from the oil spills on the ground, and we’d already gone through a lot of stuff in the house.
But there was much more to go. When I’d left my own grandmother’s house, it had been easy for me.
I had packed a bag and abandoned the rest for squatters or maybe the government, if they had wanted it.