@catladyclea: I hope they burn down that bathroom #baseballbabe #crabs
@ChrissyBleeker: This whole #baseballbabe thing isn’t a love story. It’s gross and invasive. The comments on here just go to show how vile this whole situation is. 1/25
@samtravesty: Did you all see how young #flyballgirl’s mom is? Do some math on that one. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.… #baseballbabe
@MargoHeartsDrWho: That #baseballbabe is going to be my new nightly fantasy. Those abs! He could Get. It.
One scroll through, and the sickness crested up in me again. Not just from the slander of my morals and looks, which was enough to make me want to crawl into a hole, but even the majority of well-meaning comments felt like a judgment. Like their approval of me went as far as I was willing to go with Eric.
back to sleep until after He got to be a new nighttime fantasy, while I just got to be that girl who screwed a stranger in a public bathroom. All the slut-shaming, and none of the sex. Like that time Elise and I stole a bottle of cheap wine from her parents and didn’t even get a buzz off it, but we both had monster headaches the next morning.
Eric played his part to the fullest. I checked his timeline again and he’d posted a YouTube clip of a song called “Love Is Like a Baseball Game” by the Intruders. I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to reply to his DM or FaceTime him. I just continued to scroll through Twitter in incognito mode and didn’t get back to sleep until after five.
I slammed my fist on the dryer, but no amount of pounding would make it start again. It was dead, and I’d put off laundry all week. I was down to my last pair of ratty underwear with all the elastic torn out. They kept sliding down my hips under my shorts. It drove me nuts.
“Mom, dryer won’t start!” I yelled down the hall.
She came out of her room, tying her hair into a knot on top of her head. The worry line between her eyebrows had deepened and she had dark circles from a sleepless night. If I ever met Jessica Banks in person, I’d pay her back for that alone.
Mom’s orthopedic shoes, the kind built for running trays of food for eight hours, swished across the threadbare carpet. She’d cleaned her uniform the night before. An order pad stuck out of the pocket of her apron. If my YouTube channel took off enough to support my family, that apron would be the first thing I’d burn.
“Call Elise. Let your grandma know. I have to go to work.” She ran a hand over my hair, pausing to check me over, the question lingering in her downturned mouth.
“I’m okay,” I said. Because she needed to hear it.
She nodded, kissed my cheek, and headed out the door.
The truth was, I didn’t know if I was okay or not. After my dip in the lake with Paxton the night before, I’d started to feel okay. But I couldn’t stay away from Twitter. It was like a compulsion. I didn’t want to see what people were saying about me, but I also really, really did. While the bathroom assumptions would damage my future in ways I couldn’t begin to process, the comments about how I looked and dressed hit me so much harder. Gram made most of my clothes, including the shirt with the seashells. I loved the feel of the fabric and the way it had been sewn specifically to fit me. Now it made me feel backwoods. Homespun. Trash.
Maybe Paxton was right about stepping away. From all of it. Gram wanted me to do what I had been doing, to keep my head high, to not bend, but how far could a person push back from bending before they snapped in half? I’d scrolled through Twitter until I’d passed out, and woke up again when I’d hit myself on the forehead with my phone. And with each tweet, each time I’d come across my name, the hole in my heart expanded. Until it became this void. This empty place where the person I had been went into that black hole and didn’t come out again. If I waded into the fray, I wondered if that hole would seal permanently, or if it would just shatter me completely.
I trudged into the dining room, where the Bees were already gathered, bickering over their quilt theme. If they didn’t get it together soon, they wouldn’t even have a quilt.
“I don’t see what your problem is with Defining Moments in History.” Peg glared at Donna. “Bizzy likes it. Gigi likes it. I like it. Unless that’s your problem.”
“I didn’t say I liked it,” Gigi said, her voice soft and soothing. “I said I didn’t have a problem with it. But I also see what Donna is saying. History in general covers a lot of ground. It’s not coherent enough.”
Peg huffed and crossed her arms.
Gram lit a cigarette. “What if we could make it coherent?
We could make it Defining Moments in Recent History. A few select events that tie together, like the invention of the automobile and the moon landing. The judges like that Americana shit.”
“Maybe,” Donna said. I could practically see her debating all the events of the sixties she could shuffle through and pick from. “As long as Peg sticks to the theme.”
“I’ve been sticking to the theme since you were still gluing felt flowers to your leather vests.” Peg’s fingers curled into fists.
Gigi chuckled. “You mean since last week?”
“As much as I hate to break up this wonderous meeting of the minds,” I said, plopping into Iris’s old chair, “the dryer is broken. Elise will fix it, but I need to go to the laundromat.”
Gram flicked her cigarette over the overflowing ashtray. “Ask if her momma needs any sewing done. And bring up a few jars of jam and canned tomatoes from the cellar.”
Elise would fix the dryer for free, but Gram would never allow it. We didn’t have any money to pay her, so Gram would pay in labor and canned goods. She’d give away everything that wasn’t nailed down before she’d accept help. Pride kept her from doing otherwise, and she’d hoard that pride with her dying breath.
In a town like Honeyfield, some people clung to their hate, some clung to a misguided sense of superiority, and some clung to their religion. And then there were the people like Gram, who clung to their pride. Because when you didn’t have anything else, you held on to the one thing no one else could take.
The Today show came on over the little TV with a coat hanger antenna that Gram had set up in the dining room. Eric’s cocky grin flooded the screen and I groaned. It didn’t even surprise me to see him, considering the evening news bit. It would only be a matter of time before the other networks followed the story.
He told the anchor how some events had gotten misconstrued, but he still had feelings for me, as he turned all sorrowful. “If you’re watching right now, Macy, I really want to see you again.”
“We hope you see her again too.” The news anchor placed a sympathetic hand on his arm, all smiles for the beautiful, lovesick boy at her side.
I rolled my eyes.
Donna cleared her throat, shooting a tentative glance at Gram. “He certainly is a catch. If I were a few years younger, I’d be tempted to let him feel me up in the back of a van.”
“Gross.” I threw a balled-up piece of thread at her. “He doesn’t even know me.”
“There are worse things in life than having a pretty boy trying to win your affections on national TV.” Gram waved her hand, causing smoke to dance on the air.
I quirked an eyebrow. “Don’t you want to rip off his skin and feed it to wild animals?”