5
. . . and Kyle answered.
“Hey, Lucy.”
“Oh . . . eh . . . hey, Kyle. Is Krissy there?”
“I don’t think she wants to talk right now.”
“Oh . . .”
Kyle and Krissy were twins. They both had the same sharp face, coppery hair, and gray eyes. Whenever I went over to Krissy’s house, Kyle was there, playing the part of the annoyed older brother, or the annoying younger brother, whichever suited him on the day.
Kyle had never answered Krissy’s phone before.
“. . . well . . . can you tell her I’m . . . sorry, I guess?”
“Have you two had a fight?”
“No. I don’t think so. It’s just . . . It doesn’t matter. Just tell her I called.”
“Yeah. Sure. Oh, by the way, I saw your cosplay on Insta. It looked awesome.”
As it turned out, that was the exact thing I needed to hear.
“Really? You reckon?”
“Yeah. So much better than all those other girls. They look like Barbies. You look real.”
I should’ve told him not to be such a sexist fucking pig.
But I didn’t. I knew it was wrong, but in the moment, I wanted to shut my eyes and let myself believe it.
No nuance. No niceness. No but-what-ifs.
Just me (the real girl) versus them (the fakes).
It was an ugly, petty kind of vindication, made all the uglier and pettier by me knowing how ugly and petty it was.
But, for a few short seconds, it made me feel a little less small.
“I was the Hatter. I don’t think any of them got it.”
“Oh. Like Alice in Wonderland? That’s clever.”
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, yeah. I reused an old cosplay. My grandma and I made it. Mostly from scratch, but she had some old Pride and Prejudice-y costumes lying around that we ripped apart. That’s where the top hat came from.”
“That’s really cool. You and your grandma both like old books, then?”
“I guess. Is that weird? That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Nah. It’s cool. What are your favorites?”
I didn’t stop talking for a while after that.
Cookie lay his giant, wrinkly head on my thigh and thumped his tail hopefully against the sofa. I picked up the remote, turned off the screen, and scratched Cookie behind the ears, but my attention was focused on the voice humming along on the other end of the line.
I didn’t really know Kyle. He’d always been the year above us in school.
Whether that was because he got bumped up or Krissy got bumped back, I never knew.
Krissy had told me he’d been working at their dad’s gravel quarry, driving trucks and saving money so he could go to university with something in his bank account.
Kyle’s story was a little different. He said he was managing the family business and designing an app in his spare time.
I asked him what he wanted to study.
He said nothing really, but if he had to choose, then software engineering.
He asked me what I wanted to do.
And, on impulse, I told him the truth, which was that I’d just finished a course in business administration.
Kyle Lawson was the first person to tell me congratulations. He didn’t sound fake when he said it. He sounded genuine. He sounded impressed. “I couldn’t have done that. Those remote-learning courses are harder than they look.”
“Yeah,” I said, then louder, and with more conviction, “Yeah.”
It felt different talking to him.
He felt different.
Not a safe person. Not entirely. But a safer person. A person who wasn’t stopping mid-sentence to smile for photos.
“. . . and Grandma left to take care of Auntie Dawn. She’s divorcing her husband—Auntie Dawn is, not my grandma—and it’s fine, but, like, would’ve been nice to have someone at home, you know? Maybe I’m just being an arsehole. Am I being an arsehole?”
He made a vaguely negative sound.
I kept talking.
When Cookie dropped off the sofa and started staring meaningfully at his empty food bowl, I said goodbye, asked Kyle again to tell Krissy I’d called, and hung up.
I felt better.
Not all the way better.
But better.
Still, some of that lingering unhappiness seeped back into my brain as I filled up Cookie’s bowl.
I decided to skip dinner and go straight to the shower.
I liked the shower. A single uncluttered square of space with an extractor fan that made a lot of noise but never seemed to do anything.
I stayed in until my fingers pruned and the water went cold. Then I stayed in a little longer.
There was something so comforting about getting clean.
The routine of it.
The privacy.
Ablutomania (noun): An obsessional preoccupation with cleanliness, washing, or bathing.
I’d learned the word from Call of Cthulhu, a tabletop game about slowly going mad and dying, not always in that order.
Krissy owned a copy. I’d been reluctant to play at first. I didn’t really vibe with Lovecraft’s books.
But Krissy kept asking me to play, and eventually I caved.
It didn’t take us long to figure out I was actually way more into it than she was.
I’d shoehorned “ablutomania” into my final essay (kinda like I’m shoehorning it in now). I’d hoped it’d bump my final score up enough to wriggle into a bachelor’s degree. No luck.
I was out of the shower and in my pajamas, toweling off my hair, when Cookie started barking.
I’d never heard Cookie bark like that before.
Big, heavy, angry barks that shook the whole house.
I felt the weight of that barking in my bones, in the very back of my teeth.
A primal, ugly warning, as instinctively unnerving as a bomb siren.
“Cookie! What the h—”
A knock at the door.
I straightened, wet hair flopping into my face.
I didn’t call out.
I didn’t want to.
I didn’t know why.
It had to be Grandma. No one else ever came here. She had probably lost her house key in the bottom of her jumbo-size tote bag again. Maybe she’d had an argument with Auntie Dawn. They were always arguing about something. That was what sisters did, apparently.
Another knock.
Cookie kept barking, his voice fevered and ferocious.
Slowly, I strung the towel back over the rack and made my way out of the bathroom toward the front door, weaving around cabinets, boxes, and piles of old clothes. Cookie was already at the door, howling now as he scraped at the wood.
“It’s OK,” I told him. “Cookie, it’s OK. Sit. It’s just Grandma.”
But when I opened the door, it wasn’t Grandma.
It was Kyle.
He smiled at me through the security door, his coppery hair shorter than I remembered, his arms pink with sunburn.
He was holding a bottle of vodka.
“Hi. Sorry, this is kinda random. You just seemed really sad, so I thought I’d bring you something to cheer you up.”
“Oh . . . um . . . I’m fine, actually.”
He kept standing there, smiling, holding out the vodka like he expected me to reach through the security screen and take it.
Cookie pushed up behind me, his deep, slobbery baying loud enough to stab like knives into my ears.
“How do you know where I live?” I asked, almost shouting.
“Krissy has your address in her phone contacts.”
I was suddenly painfully aware that I was wearing pajamas—my Hello Kitty pajamas—at a decidedly uncool time of the evening to be getting ready for bed. “She does?”
He slowly retracted the vodka bottle. “Do you want me to go?”
I could’ve said yes.
I could’ve closed the door.
I wanted to.
But it felt mean to turn him away after he’d driven across town.
Also, the vodka bottle was unopened. He’d probably bought it just for me.
No one had ever bought me a drink before.
“No. You can stay. I . . . um. Let me just put the dog in the other room. Then you can come in.” I closed the door, grabbed Cookie by the collar, and dragged him into Grandma’s bedroom.
He didn’t go willingly, barking and wrenching my arm the whole way.
“Fuck,” I hissed as I shoved him into the room and slammed the door. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” I looked around the hallway. Cluttered, claustrophobic, and lined with boxes full of stuff, half of which Cookie had knocked over in the tussle. “Fuck.”
Uncertainty corkscrewed in my gut.
Not even Krissy had seen the inside of my house.
She’d picked me up plenty of times. She was the first to get her driver’s license, and compared to mine, her car felt like a spaceship.
She didn’t know my grandma kept so much stuff inside.
No one did. Would Kyle tell her? Would they call her a hoarder?
I should’ve told him I wasn’t in the mood to hang out.
Or, better yet, I should’ve just not gone back to the door.
The security screen was closed. He couldn’t get in.
Except that would be weird; I’d already told him he could come in, and he’d been nice to me before. Krissy would be upset if I was shitty to her brother . . . and I didn’t need another reason for Krissy to be upset with me.
“Fuck,” I said one more time, and went back to the door.
Kyle was still there, still smiling. “That’s a big dog.”
“He’s nice.”
He didn’t sound nice. Even muffled through the walls, Cookie’s barking was apocalyptic.
“Can I?” Kyle stepped forward.
I opened the security door and stepped aside to let him in. Then, as quickly as I could, I closed the door, grabbed his wrist, and led him through the house into Grandma’s study.
It was clearer than the rest of the house, but not by much. Between the sewing machine, a stack of old birdcages, and a bookcase, there was a gap of open carpet wide enough to look like a room. “We moved recently,” I lied, and sat cross-legged on the ground. “Everything’s a mess.”
“It’s cool.” He sat next to me and unscrewed the lid off the vodka bottle. It cracked slightly, a seal breaking.
I thought of the fizzy vodka Cruisers I’d left at Ginger’s place. Strawberry flavored. There was strategy in that. The sugar masked the burn. I’d never had vodka unmixed before, but I’d seen enough videos of gagging teenagers to know I didn’t want to.
“You’re really quiet,” Kyle said. “You were talking heaps on the phone.” He took a swig from the bottle and held it out to me.