Eric (Baseball Babe) Dufrane: Hi.
This was too much. I closed Twitter and headed inside to break up another fight between the Bees. I’d figure out what to do about Eric and his DM tomorrow.
CHAPTER
FIVE
AFTER DONNA AND GIGI went home, I headed into the kitchen and poured myself some sun tea. Condensation beaded along the faded daisy print on the glass, and I rested it against my cheek. It had been so hot today. The window air-conditioning unit above the sink barely had enough power to cool half the room. The cross-breeze Gram tried to create by leaving the doors open on either end of the house didn’t do a lot when there wasn’t any breeze to begin with.
Peg came into the kitchen, thrumming her nails on the peeling yellow countertops that hadn’t been changed since Gram bought this house forty years ago. “We can handle ourselves, you know. You don’t have to throw yourself into every squabble.”
I smirked. “Is that why Donna looked about two seconds away from ripping out your throat with her teeth?”
“I make one joke about a pro–Vietnam War theme and she loses it.” Peg’s lip curled. “Peace and love, my ass.”
The front screen door slammed shut, and I patted Peg’s arm as I passed, laughing at the snarl still etched into the lines around her mouth. Mom carried in a basket of brown eggs, a loaf of freshly baked bread resting on top of them. I raised my eyebrows in question.
“I caught Fanny on baking day.” Mom nodded to the bread. “I offered her some peppers from the garden, but she said she already had more veggies than she could eat in a week.”
“Nice.” I’d give Fanny a free rental next time she came by on my shift. I took the basket from Mom and she followed me into the kitchen. We had chili mac baking in the oven, and the homey scent made my stomach rumble. “I’m so hungry, I could eat that whole loaf myself.”
“Me too.” Mom ruffled my short hair.
I hadn’t managed to eat lunch, my stomach still too sick to handle food. Instead I spent hours on Twitter, using my mobile browser in incognito mode instead of the app. It didn’t do anything except keep my searches out of my history, but it made me feel better. Like if it wasn’t in my history, I didn’t really look it up. I stayed glued to my phone until the battery dwindled to 1 percent.
I read full threads calling out voyeurism and asking people to respect my privacy. I read comments questioning whether I was pretty enough for the stunning male specimen that was the Baseball Babe. I read a handful of people wondering if I got paid to have sex with Eric in the bathroom, because my Instagram pictures showed I was clearly in need of money. I’d locked my Instagram hours ago, but not before plenty of people had gotten screenshots. Someone set up a GoFundMe for my lawyer fees, for when they expected I’d inevitably sue Jessica Banks. A roaring headache pounded in the bridge of my nose and went all the way down to my neck.
Jessica fielded questions like a pro. It was like she’d been given the lead role in the summer’s biggest blockbuster, and she was milking it for all it was worth. I had no idea what she wanted from all this, but she bathed in the attention, tagging every media outlet on the planet, making it very clear how willing she’d be to give even more details on air. Stuff she said she hadn’t yet posted to Twitter. Like the whole lie she created about Eric screwing me in a public bathroom wasn’t enough.
When I’d had about all I could take of Twitter, I flipped to my email. I had no clue how my email address had gotten out there, but I read three offers to star in a porno movie and five rants about how “girls like me” were single-handedly responsible for all the filth and corruption in the world before I shut that down too. I still had over fifteen hundred unread messages in my inbox. How could I act normal enough to choke down dinner?
Mom went to work cutting up vegetables for our salad while I set the table. We fell into the easy rhythm of Sunday dinner prep. Even with the sweltering heat, I lived for summer nights like this. Current situation notwithstanding. After dinner we typically humored Gram and Peg by pretending to watch the evening news while they took bets on which anchor would be the first to keel over from a heart attack. Old people and their morbid games. Then Peg would go home, Gram would go to bed, and Mom would slip out to the Hamptons to enjoy a glass of tea and her romance novels until the sun set. I still had movie and lake plans, as far as I knew. No one had texted me to say otherwise.
Elise had touched base with me a few times to see how I was holding up, and to fill me in on all the ways Midnight was terrorizing Brady on his first day. Aside from sticking him on rewind duty, Midnight had him go through the store to make sure everything was still in alphabetical order. She also quizzed him on various movies he’d probably never heard of, let alone seen, so he could make appropriate recommendations. And of course she looked down her nose at him for not knowing any of the VHS movies. He didn’t even need to know old movies to rewind and run the register; she just liked to play boss.
Peg had gone around back to help Gram unload the half cow from the car. She’d bring some of it to Gigi—and Donna, once they were on speaking terms again—since their efforts had helped purchase the beef. We gathered around the table, conversation flowing easily enough between Mom, Gram, and Peg that no one noticed how I picked at my dinner. I was starving, but my mind drifted back to Twitter, Eric, and Jessica.
“Next time you’re at work, can you bring home Big Business?” Peg asked me. We were one of a handful of homes in Honeyfield that still had a working VCR. The perks of living with an old lady who refused to throw anything away. “I sure do like that Bette Midler, and it’s been ages since I’ve seen that movie.”
“No problem.” I tried to smile, but it took more effort than it was worth. This might be the last family dinner we had together before I told them what happened. And once I did, everything would certainly go to hell.
Mom kept shooting me worried glances, that line between her eyebrows deepening, like she knew I was wrestling with something, trying to find the right words to voice it. She’d always let me have my space to work things out, and wouldn’t question me within Gram’s sharp hearing range. But she worried.
We cleaned up dinner as Peg and Gram headed into the living room. Once they left the kitchen, Mom turned to me. “Is everything okay?”
I’d probably been acting as twitchy as she had when she had to tell Gram she was pregnant. Which no doubt activated her greatest fear. The fear I’d come home one day and announce the same. Mom didn’t set down a lot of rules, but she’d been very firm on three: No Sex before College (already broke that one), Never Chase a Dream Over a Paycheck (on my way to breaking that fully with my YouTube aspirations), and Never Date Your Coworkers (the only one I hadn’t managed to break yet). She didn’t have a problem with me dating, so long as I followed the rules, which I swore up and down I did.
I’d never tell her I already lost my virginity. She’d probably march out into the streets and try to find it again. It scared her bad. The handful of times Lance and I had had sex, we’d been careful. We broke up months ago and I hadn’t been with anyone since.
“I’m fine.” I gave her a fake grin, which was probably more of a grimace judging by the way my lips stretched tightly over my teeth. “Peg and Donna got into a pretty ugly fight, and I’m still on edge from it.”