Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
“Mmmm, that feels good,” she says as I massage the SPF into her already dappled, suntanned skin. It makes me a little nervous when she says it like that? I’m never quite sure if she’s just expressing herself honestly or hitting on me. Not that I’d be offended. I’ve seen pictures of Sheila when she was around my age. She could probably have had her pick of anybody she wanted. Honestly, the idea that she might be flirting with me is pretty flattering. But it would also still be a little awkward. I have to live here and everything.
“That’s good, dear, thank you.”
I stop rubbing, pick up a hand towel, wipe the excess sunscreen from my fingertips, fold the towel neatly, and place it back down on the side table next to Sheila’s piña colada.
“Is everything okay?” she asks after a moment.
“Yeah, sure, why?”
“Your leg.”
I look down at my leg and notice for the first time that it’s bouncing. To be clear: It’s bouncing. I’m not bouncing it. It’s like it has a mind of its own. “Oh, sorry.” I work to still the movement and start biting my nails again.
“I thought we might be having an earthquake,” Sheila says, voice muffled in the beach towel she has rolled under her face. “What’s got you anxious?”
“Oh, nothing. Just, y’know, my book. Vegas coming up. All that.”
“I understand.”
“You do?” That’s surprising. I mean, I haven’t known Sheila that long, but she doesn’t seem like the type to get anxious about anything. Maybe when she was younger. Whenever that was.
“Of course I do. I remember when I first went to Vegas and how intimidated I felt.”
“I don’t think it’s really the Vegas part itself, that—”
“So many hopes and dreams. Glitz and glamour. It’ll wrap you up and spin you around like you’re on a rollercoaster. Crazy, crazy times.”
I would ask her to say more, but she does this sometimes. Says some partial thought about some long-ago memory out loud and when I ask her to expand upon it, she just moves on or acts like she didn’t hear. Like the time she fell asleep out here and I heard her mumble in her slumber, “If we don’t bury it deeper, someone will find it.” Then she startled herself awake and, when I asked her what she was dreaming about, she said, “An old boyfriend.”
I told her she was talking in her sleep and what she said, and she just smiled, stood up, went inside the house and asked if I wanted lemonade.
So I’ve stopped asking. But it seems like Sheila has lived, from what I can tell.
“Why don’t you jump in the pool, dear?” she offers. “Swim a lap or two. Work out some of that excess energy.”
“I’m okay. Maybe later.”
I actually hate going in the pool. I don’t like getting recreationally wet. Not sure why that is, apart from the fact that getting in water means eventually you have to get out of the water, get in other water to clean off the water you were just in, and then get yourself cleaned up and ready to face the world looking like you were never in water in the first place. Seems like a lot of work just to do something where you could drown.
I stand and start pacing instead. Pacing, chewing at my nails, pushing back behind my ear the one errant strand of hair that keeps falling in my face.
Owing to the fact that I haven’t gone outside much this summer, I also haven’t had my hair cut in months. It’s down almost to just below my shoulder blades, which is the longest I’ve had it since I was a kid and this boy who sat behind me in homeroom used to pull on it and make fun of my name. Cordelia Sarantopoulos. He’d say things like, “I thought Greek girls were supposed to be pretty. What happened to you?” And stuff like that.
I wrote him as a character into The Clock Chimes for Love, the first book of The Purity Principle. He got hit by a train.
Suddenly, the door to my little pied-à-terre opens and Britney steps out. My breathing speeds up. I stop biting my nails, but I’m now wringing my hands together feverishly, twisting and turning at my fingers like I’m trying to wash them clean of something that won’t come off. Straight-up Lady Macbeth.
I can’t read Britney’s expression. She’s got a neutral face on like the one she puts on when guys start hitting on her at the bar or the club. It happens a lot—that she gets hit on—so it’s a very practiced look. And I know what it means when some Chad is trying to get her Insta or whatever, but I have no idea what it means here, now, in this context.
My hope is that it’s a preamble to her bursting into a wide smile, throwing her arms open wide, and saying, “It’s a-MAY-zing!” in that way she does. But I just don’t know.