The Sea of Tranquility(46)
Author: Katja Millay

“How come? You’re the only person I’ve ever seen running without music. Doesn’t it get boring?” he asks. It’s a valid question, but it doesn’t get boring. It’s never quiet enough to get boring and I certainly don’t plan to stick shit in my ears like a written invitation for someone to jump me. I shrug, pushing it back further on the counter and turning away.

“Not really. I heard you and my aunt had a nice chat,” I say sarcastically, moving to the sofa. I kick my shoes off and tuck my feel underneath me.

“I was wondering if she’d mention that.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugs. Between the two of us we do a lot of shrugging. Maybe that’s why I finally started talking to him. My shoulders just got tired.

“What did she say?” he asks, sinking down next to me.

“She said she wasn’t stupid and that I shouldn’t treat her like she is.”

“So are you not supposed to be here right now?”

“No. She’s okay. She just expects me to let her know where I am from now on. As long as I text her it’s fine.” It’s true. Margot did sit me down and lecture me. She made sure I felt the full measure of my lack of consideration for her and that I understood that if anything happened to me, she would be the one dealing with the wrath of my mother; a five-foot three woman who could strike fear in a berserker. But God bless Margot, because she wasn’t going to force me into a corner with rules and ultimatums, either, which was good, because I would have ignored them. Not because I wanted to rebel against her or because I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do, but because I wasn’t going to give up sitting in that garage.

“Look Em,” she said, “I’m not naïve. I was young, too. I’m thirty-two years old and I still have a list of stories I will never tell my mother, and if Charlotte was my mother, that list would be even longer, so believe me, I understand. But you also need to understand that you are my responsibility and beyond that I love you.” I think I cringed at that part but she ignored me and kept going. “You’ll be eighteen years old soon and I know exactly how futile it will be to forbid you to do anything, but I need you to respect me enough to let me know where you are and who you’re with and what you’re doing. If you do, we’ll be fine. If you don’t, I will not hesitate to throw you under the bus with your mother.”

She made sure to tack on that she knew I was a smart girl and that smart girls often do the stupidest things and then she hugged me and told me I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge me. I think it was her version of a sex talk.

I hugged her back because it was my only way to say thank you to her for letting me keep him without a fight. She wasn’t going to make it difficult for me to see him and I desperately needed something in my life that wasn’t difficult.

CHAPTER 25

Josh

“How’d you learn to cook?” The legs are swinging from my kitchen counter, not my workbench, tonight. She eats here all the time now. Sometimes she helps. Sometimes she watches. She always talks.

I reach up and open the cabinet over the refrigerator where my mother stored all of her cookbooks. She looks up at the overfilled shelf. I really only use a few of the ones in the front, but the cabinet goes pretty far back and the books are in there three rows deep.

“You learned to cook by reading cookbooks?” She raises her eyebrows.

“Isn’t that how most people do it?”

“Not most seventeen year-old boys.”

“I don’t think many seventeen year-old boys learn to cook at all.”

No response to this one. I didn’t say it to make her feel bad, but I think she does, because that quiet sets in. The quiet everyone thinks they should fill but they can’t because they’re busy trying to figure out what to say. So while they sit and think about it, the silence stretches out until there aren’t any words left that wouldn’t make everything more uncomfortable. All the ok things to say dissolved in the silence while they were busy thinking.

“If it sucks, can we order pizza?” she asks. Silence can’t win against her. It doesn’t intimidate her at all. When you spend over a year not talking to another living person, I guess you learn to manipulate the voids.

“It won’t suck,” I respond.

“Confident, aren’t we?” she mocks.

“I’ve been cooking a while.”

“How long?”

“Three years, give or take.” It was right around the time when my grandmother got too sick to do it anymore. About the same time I had to learn to use the washing machine and empty the vacuum cleaner.

“Since you were fourteen? Why?”

“I got tired of eating dry cereal out of the box for dinner every night, so one day I pulled out the books and started reading.”

“I can’t cook for shit.”

“You can bake.” Damn can she bake. She brought those peanut butter cookies over last week covered in sugar with a criss-cross pattern across the top. As soon as I looked at them, I remembered that my mother used to make them, too, but I had completely forgotten. And it made me wonder how many other things about her I had forgotten.

“Not the same thing.”

“You could learn to cook if you wanted to. I’ll even loan you a cookbook if you want,” I say half-sarcastically. She doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about that. “It’s not that hard.”

“Maybe not for you. We can’t all be awesome at everything like Josh Bennett.” She makes me sound like a renowned jackass.

“You know how many meals awesome Josh Bennett effed up in the beginning?” Now I’m making myself sound like a renowned jackass.

“Enlighten me.”

“Let’s just say I didn’t quit eating cereal for the first few months. And even then, my grandfather and I ate a lot of dry, overcooked food.”

“You could have eaten at Drew’s house every night.”

“Yeah, if I wanted to put up with Drew every night.” I’m not that much of a glutton for punishment, but she’s right; I was always invited.

“He is your best friend. Not that I have any clue how that happened.”

“We were in Little League together. When everybody started dying and everybody else started ignoring me, he didn’t. He just kept coming back and coming back, even when I tried to get rid of him. Eventually I realized he wasn’t going anywhere.”