Then there was the bra. I couldn’t wear a bra to bed. I’d suffocate in my sleep. But what if Drew got up and needed something during the night? I couldn’t let him see me without a bra. Finally I put on my bra and left it unfastened.
I curled up on the couch in the living room, with the guest room door just down the hall. Drew’s cheek still burned a hole through my thigh, his hand through my knee. His thumb crested my fingertips and sank into the hollows between my fingers. The Weather Channel and the threat of a turbulent front on the way lulled me to sleep.
The shower in the hall bathroom woke me. My mouth was wide open. Drew had walked across the hall from the gueşt room to the bathroom. He’d probably looked in here and seen me snoring.
I jumped to the mirror above the fireplace to make sure there wasn’t any drool on my face, at least. Then I passed my hands across my cheeks and fingered my hair down where it stuck up in back.
I never wore makeup, and my hair was short and easy to fix. There was no reason for me to worry about Drew seeing me when I first woke up. I didn’t look much different from how I looked at school. I worried anyway. I even thought about running to my room and changing into a tight T-shirt and jeans. But that might make it seem like I cared.
Mom flowed downstairs in full makeup, with her hair already coiffed. My friends bought their mothers flowered robes and fuzzy high-heeled slippers for their birthdays as a joke, to wear when they broke out the toning masks and had spa day. My mother bought this stuff for herself and wore it every day, no joke. Every day was spa day at Chez Sauter.
I followed her into the kitchen, set the table, and helped her start breakfast. Soon Dad sat down in his business clothes and a tie, ready to go to the hospital to make rounds.
Then Drew, looking pale under his tan. He pushed the SA T book across the table to me. He must have gone out this morning and fished it from the car. Or maybe he’d retrieved it during the night and slept with it stuck to his forehead on the off chance some of it would seep into his brain.
“Ignominy,” I said, crunching bacon.
“I don’t know that one,” Mom said.
“Dishonor,” Drew said.
I flipped through the pages. “Nefarious,” I said.
“I don’t know that one,” Mom said.
“Wicked,” Drew said.
“A trocity,” I said.
“I don’t know that one,” Mom said. For being crowned Miss State of A labama 1982, Mom won a full college scholarship. She dropped out of college to get her Mrs. degree and work to put Dad through medical school. Since then, reading Vogue was the only exercise she gave her poor cerebrum. Possibly she only looked at the pictures.
“A savagely cruel act,” Drew said. “Or something in shockingly bad taste.”
I glanced up at him. He was eating, and answering these definitions without thinking. I examined the book closely to find a word that was both difficult and appropriate. “Opprobrious,” I said.
“Disgraceful or shameful,” said Drew. “I thought we’d called a truce. You’re fighting with me with SA T words again.”
“She’s not doing it for your benefit,” Dad butted in. “She’s doing it for mine.” He reached across the table, jerked the SA T book from my hands, and thumbed through it. “A ha. Vendetta.”
“A long and bitter feud,” Drew said.
“You know this stuff cold.” Dad handed the book back to me without looking at me.
This time I had a word in mind. I’d thought about Dad when I came across it in English class. I looked it up, then read, “Mountebank.”
“A quack who isn’t what he seems to be,” Drew said.
Dad got up and took his half-full plate to the sink.
Mom protested, “You’re not going to eat?”
“Not hungry,” Dad grumbled, walking back upstairs.
My mom gave me a disapproving look, but she didn’t say anything. She’d always stayed out of the fight between me and Dad, even though it had everything to do with her.
Drew stared after Dad, then wisely changed the subject. Waving at a shelf full of trophies and sashes and pictures of me wearing makeup, he asked, “A m I hallucinating?”
“No,” I said. “I was Miss Junior East-Central A labama 2004. I tried to throw all this stuff out, but Mom commandeered it and displayed it in her kitchen to spite me.”
Mom said, “You don’t want to throw out all those good memories just because you’re going through a phase.”
“See?” I said. “My mother is the one hallucinating.”
Mom huffed out a dainty sigh and stood, putting her manicured hand on Drew’s arm. “I’ll make you some coffee.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “You don’t let me drink coffee.”
“Drew is older than you,” she called from the kitchen.
“He’s seventeen!”
Drew smirked at me.
“It’ll stunt your growth,” I told him.
“I’m six foot two. So, you don’t get along with your dad?”
“Perspicacious,” I said.
“Having keen insight.”
I glared at him.
“Oh,” he said. “You mean me.”
“I liked you a lot better when you had a fever.”
The doorbell rang, probably Drew’s father. Dad came downstairs again to answer the door. Mom floated in and handed Drew a travel mug.
He thanked her so much for her hospitality, blah blah blah.
A s he walked toward the door, Mom held me back. “He has very good manners. He seems like a nice boy,” she whispered, like I’d intended to bring him home to meet the parents.
Of course he seemed like a nice boy. Mom would think Eminem seemed like a nice boy compared to Walter. Walter had perfectly good manners too, but Walter lived in a bus. It was hard for people to get past the bus.
Out on the front porch Dad and Drew talked with Drew’s father. He must have come straight from the night shift at the mill. He was covered in a thin white film, and larger clumps of cotton stuck to the back of his hair and his work shirt.
Drew motioned to his dad s car, and I followed him. He bent his head down close to me and said quietly, “Thank you.”
“For what? Strep throat?”
He frowned. “Why won’t you let me thank you? What s happened? A re you acting this way because I asked you about your dad?”
There was no way he’d forgotten about what he was doing with his hand the night before. If I’d felt what I felt, he had to have felt something, no matter how out of it he was.