Baked, like the desert.
Baked.
Like an evaporated lake, all cracked and scorched.
Why was the lake scorched?
Because of the system-wide reboot. The rain would come and everything would start again.
I tried to explain this to my friends, and they seemed to understand, but when I opened my eyes, they weren't where I remembered them being.
The brunette untangled herself from Spanky's many, many arms and excused herself to go to the washroom.
I turned to Charity, who was sitting on the arm of my chair. Had she always been there? The arm wasn't very comfortable compared to a whole chair, but it made sense, because of the whole system-wide reboot. After I put the new upholstery on the chair, everything would be comfortable.
The brunette was back. Suddenly. And now she was staring at me, shooting me with X-rays.
“Where'd you go?” I demanded. “Why aren't you in the bathroom?”
“That was an hour ago,” she said.
I gave Spanky a stern look. “Who's watching the time? That's your job. If you make us smoke all the spacejunk, you have to watch out for the time.”
Spanky gave me a sideways look, his head tilting farther than seemed safe. “What spacejunk?”
I looked down again at the armrest. Not the one with Charity on it, but the other one, with the control panel for the space ship.
They were making fun of me, so I pretended we were just back at the house, sitting in the living room like normal humans. I rubbed my chin with my hand. That felt really good, so I rubbed my whole face. My mouth tasted like how blue cheese smells. Someone started rubbing my back, between my shoulder blades, and I felt like my whole body was having an orgasm.
This made everyone laugh, even though I didn't tell them, which seemed like the normal way to communicate.
She kept rubbing my back, so I kept making the sounds.
Then I was distracted by how everything had a color, and all the things were different colors. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of my tattoos. I was very careful to not look at my arms again, because you do not need your tattoos crawling around when you are baked like an evaporated lake.
Someone knocked on the front door. My guts liquefied. Aubrey knew where I lived. She'd seen me through the front window, through the closed curtains, with Charity sitting on my armrest.
Spanky pulled himself out of the couch with a groan. “I don't know who that is, since everybody's here,” he said.
I decided to sit very still. Charity had pulled her hand away from my back, so I leaned back into the chair. She reached down and tapped my belt buckle.
“Fancy,” she said.
I pushed her hand away. “Personal space.”
This set the two girls laughing, and Charity rolled off the armrest to the floor, then rolled the rest of the way over to her friend.
We all got quiet, because a new person was in the room. A man with red hair. His hair was so red it made Spanky's look blond. This new redder man had a baby in his arms. The baby also had red hair, which made me wonder if they were the same person, from two different time lines. On one level, I knew that wasn't true, and that I was way too high, but puzzling over the possibility was satisfying for my mind.
The redder man said, “I've been chewing his nails off, like this.” He put the baby's fingers in his mouth, and I recoiled in horror, remembering the time a friend's horse nipped me when I was giving him sugar cubes. I'd gotten in trouble for not holding my palms up. That was really unfair.
The man said, “Nom nom nom,” to the baby.
I expected the girls to do something, because they were the only girls there and surely they knew all about babies by instinct. They just sat on the couch with grim faces and heavy eyelids. They both had the same color of blue eyes, despite completely different hair. That seemed suspicious.
Spanky came running down from upstairs with a shining pair of nail clippers in his hands.
The man thanked him and left.
I looked at my blue shirt and wondered if I was actually at London Drugs again. No, I was at home, in my house.
Spanky sat down again across from me.
“Spanky, did some guy just come in and borrow our nail clippers?”
“Gotta be neighborly,” he said.
I wanted to make a joke, or get another beer to wash out my mouth, but guilt fell upon me like an iron spiderweb. A baby had been inside our home and now everything was off, like a bass out of tune.
Incompatible.
My life was a box of jagged glass, incompatible with small people.
I couldn't ruin Aubrey's daughter's life. I didn't even know the little kid, and I was already tainting her life, taking time away from her mother.
I didn't even know if we were together, but we had to break up.
Immediately.
Already, my solid thoughts were eroding. I had to break up with her while I was still lucid inside this dry desert of knowledge.
I looked around the room for my phone, but the room was hiding it.
Charity wiggled across the floor toward me, moving like an inchworm in a storybook, and then she was at my feet, my knees. She smiled and winked at me, then turned her back and hooked her armpits on top of my knees and sat on the floor between my feet. She reached up and flipped out her long, flaxen hair, so it was cascading up my inner thighs. The gold river of hair started to make me feel charitable toward Charity.
My body relaxed, relief flooding my system. I was less baked than a minute earlier. We were no longer on a spaceship.
Everything was connected and my whole life made sense. I could see clearly now that everything was completely, utterly wrong.
Chapter Twenty-One
AUBREY
One thing I loved about working at the bar was being in a child-free zone. I didn't mind being around children, but constantly comparing myself to other parents was exhausting.
First, there were the super-parents. Their kids had clean, nice clothes and said please and thank you under the parents' vigilant watch. I watched them and tried to learn.
Then there were the parents who'd given up. Their dirty-faced kids ran around like monkeys, and the parents didn't care. Those kids seemed to be just as happy as the ones who said please and thank you.
No matter what you do as a parent, someone's going to think you're doing it wrong.
Some judgmental wench thinks you're doing it wrong.
I was grocery shopping with Bell, back when she'd just turned five and was going through a real bossy stage. We were in the line, and she made a point of asking if we could buy everything. The magazines, the chocolate bars, the gum, and even those little plastic chip-bag clips. You name it, she felt it was her right as a small person to have it, and who could blame her? All around her, other kids were getting things.