[All characters in this story are 18 years of age or older.]
"Thanks. I mean, seriously, S, thank you so much for coming to get me."
"It is my pleasure," Seong said... which, obviously, there was no reason for her to say out loud since I could see it in that serene Seong-feels-everything-is-right-with-the-world expression on her face. Seong is one of those people who can smile without their lips changing position, if you know what I'm talking about. It's like if a string on a guitar is barely a tiny bit out of tune, the noise gets to you even if you don't have a good musical ear to know why -- but then the guitarist twists one little tuning peg by like two degrees, and it sounds great. Something beyond your ability to consciously perceive changes and turns things better. That was a Seong smile, most of the time. Just to make herself even more crystal-clear, she added, "I'm very happy you're not making the mistake you thought you wanted to make."
I felt the late-afternoon sky open up even wider above me. Kids were playing in the park, you could hear splashing from the community-center pool where Seong had pulled her petal-blue hatchback into the lot. Under some nearby trees, this family had their dinner all set up on one of the picnic tables.
The world felt wholesome.
"I'm happy too," I said, tugging the door shut and buckling my seatbelt. "It was
super
close to being a really giant mistake."
Seong put the car in reverse, glanced at the backup screen, but then looked at me instead of backing the car out. Her eyes narrowed, curious and amused. "Something is very different with you this evening than when I dropped you off last night."
"Yeah, whoo."
Last night, I'd just had my life turned to shit by my shitty-ass boyfriend cheating on me with our shitty-ass housemate slut Eddi. But this morning...
"You don't know the half of it, let me tell you."
She glanced both ways behind us, then watched our progress with the back-up camera as we swung out of the space. "Please, do."
I thought,
Go ahead. If there's anyone you can tell, it's Seong. You know you can trust her.
And I did -- trust her, that is. But I needed a little more space to let this thing out. Even after four or five hours trying to get my head around it, the reality of having watched my sister boink my dad three different times today had me pretty off-balance.
"Or don't," Seong said. "I don't want to pry, C."
I could hear a little disappointment in her voice, though.
She can tell how big this is, and she may not want to pry, but she wants to believe I'd tell her about something important. Okay... I'll work up to it slow.
"So..." Neighborly houses passed by on either side, then the big tree-lined avenue out of my subdivision. "All right. I guess first off, the reason I needed you to come get me is, Dad and Kell were asleep when I got in last night, and they didn't notice I was there when they got up this morning, and I decided I wanted to keep it that way."
"Your explanation suggests the contours of ancillary facts and considerations much more interesting than the explanation itself."
"You're so goddamn nosey, S," I said, making her laugh. "I'm
getting
to it. Sheesh."
Only really, I wasn't, was I?
On the way down MacArthur Street to the highway, I told her how Dad and Kellie had gotten a security company to put in an alarm system fifteen years after the house was built pre-wired for one. I told her about the installation guy's smooth and reassuring voice. I told her about the way it would beep whenever an exterior door got opened, so I couldn't sneak out as long as they were anywhere in the house because they'd hear. At the light before the highway, I told her how I'd had to wait the whole afternoon for them to leave and go to dinner, with only half a bag of cheese puffs from my backpack to survive on.
"You and cheese puffs," she sighed. Seong is
extremely
fastidious, and would never sink so low as to get her fingers covered in cheese-puff dandruff. I put one in her mouth for her once and she went wide-eyed over the taste, but later I caught her eating from the bag with chopsticks and I laughed so hard she never touched them again. (At least, not when I've been looking.)
I tell you, though, that girl knows how to make a sigh say ten different things the same way she knows how to smile without moving her lips. This one definitely had an eyeroll in it about my obsession with cheesy snacks... but it also had a wistful longing over the fact that she fucking loved cheese puffs but her dignity wouldn't let her eat them. On top of that, it carried more than a little trademark Seong hyper-suppressed impatience, which told me she knew I was delaying the main point of this conversation, but that she would humor me as long as she could.
And considering I still didn't feel any braver about it, I went whole-hog taking advantage of her humoring me.
Over the ten-minute highway trip to her part of town, I told her my plan on getting out -- to wait until I heard Dad and Kell arm the alarm system and let the door swing shut behind them, then run downstairs and go out the back during the thirty-second delay before the system activated and opening the door would trigger the apocalypse. I also told her how the cheese puffs didn't last, how I got really thirsty, how I started to
really
need to pee again well before six o'clock rolled around, which was when my dad and sister had talked about going to dinner. But I did
not
tell her about opening my laptop again and watching, over and over, the videos I'd taken with my phone. Nor did I tell her the videos even existed, or the things I'd seen my father and sister do while filming them.
(I also did not tell her about peeing in the Gatorade bottle, which happened again late that afternoon. Like I said, she's way fastidious, and whatever patience she had left for my roundabout description of the day would have been flushed down the toilet by hearing I'd used a plastic bottle to relieve myself in not once but twice.)
I wanted to hear what she had to say about all of it (not the pee bottle), and I knew what she had to say would help me... I guess I just also wanted to know a little more how
I
felt about all of it before I found out how
she
felt about it.
"Hey," I said, an idea popping into my head to let me keep stalling. "Want to hear something funny?"
"Who ever answers that question, 'No'?"
"Kellie was talking about... about how stupid I was to always let Brandt drag me around to places I didn't want to go, and she said, 'You know Chelse, what you really ought to do is...'"
And... full stop.
My sister's joke didn't want to leave my lips for some reason. Maybe because I was being dishonest the way I was telling it, since Kellie didn't say it to me, she said it to Dad. Maybe because Seong deserved better than me stalling the conversation, especially since I
did
want to tell her about what I'd seen and learned, spying on the two of them.
And maybe because you know Kell was like ninety-five percent serious and hardly joking at all. God, she hates Brandt.
Only was that all? Because Dad had said something too, hadn't he? Right after she'd suggested I ought to make a move on my best friend, he said to Kell,
"You and your thing about Seong again."
Kellie didn't just hate Brandt. She wanted me to be happy. And she liked Seong a
lot
.
Yeah, but later she also said, "Probably there's nothing there at all." She thought the idea of the two of us hooking up was funny and hot, that's all.
Only there was also that thing about Seong being a "freaky beautiful soul" and the only person I hung out with who was good enough for me.
Oh shit. What if she was a
hundred
percent serious and not joking even a little bit? What if she was just dodging Dad when she said there was probably nothing there? What if she
really
thought I ought to do that?
And I looked over at Seong and I knew exactly why Kell might have such a thought.
If I was wired that way, I couldn't do much better than a girl like Seong.
Which made my brain do one of those things where it tells you something without you trying to even think about it.
