Club None

VI.

 "...he was dreamy," Alice said. "I almost fainted, right into the mouth of a trash can."

Ellie propped her swollen ankles on the camper's sagging front stop. Red rings marked deep grooves in her skin. She rubbed her hipbone, searching for an adequate response.

"You don't look like garbage?"

"I didn't fall." her step-sister sniffed. Shook coffee grounds from her fingers. "He caught me."

"Romantic. I assume he grabbed a handful on the way down?"

"Ellie." Alice stood up. She blew out a plume of smoke, cheeks hollowing in around her cigarette. On her last exhale she reached around the plastic door and stubbed it out on the ceramic plate she kept for keys, cactus fragments, and ashes. "How tacky."

Rowan's face appeared through the door. Her face was obscured, half-opaque in the plastic light, then clear and present and smiling, amused. "Sister, sister. You're a magnet."

Alice sucked foam from the rim of her coffee cup. "For dreamboats?"

"Freaks, geeks, punks, and junks," Ellie said. She smiled back at their step-sister. "How's the stomach?"

"Better than yours, I think." Rowan kicked off her shoes. She pushed the door aside and slunk into a sitting position. "I shot down some Pepto-Bismol an hour ago but I couldn't keep it in my throat. Do you know what color is it on the other side?"

"Oh, you don't have to –" Alice grabbed another cigarette.

"– vivid and pink."

"Blech."

Ellie leaned the weight of her heel onto one foot, then another. The step creaked in protest. "I have fifteen missed phone calls," she said. "Wager a guess?"

"Duane?" Rowan inhaled Alice's smoke on accident. Coughing, she dug out a Diet Coke from the case on the floor. "The creep. I thought he only got one phone call."

"No," Ellie said, "well, yes, he did, but I think he's out now. It's our old number. The house phone."

"Hmm." her other step-sister, breathing ash-grey clouds into the tarped ceiling, furrowed her forehead. "The restraining order –"

"— good for within one hundred feet of me. Nothing about the house."

"Does he know?"

"He should."

"Ellie, my dear." Rowan squeezed her knee. "There have been better times to cut ties and flee."

"No," Ellie said, "there have not. There was not." she closed her eyes. "Maybe there was. I don't know. It wasn't like I tried. It wasn't like I knew."

Alice snorted. "He was an asshole. What proof did you need?"

"Nothing. No proof. I didn't – didn't need proof." Ellie concentrated, hard, on the end of the dead cigarette. "So." she turned to Rowan. "Did Alice tell you about the dreamboat she met?"

Silence hung between her step-sisters. They held practiced, matching looks of consternation – Alice, sending smoke signals from her pursed lips to the camper's plastic sky, and Rowan, twisting her nose ring in circles. Parties raged in the distance. Music crept across the ground and shook the earth beneath them, bass line rumbling over the campsite.

Ellie turned back to face the darkening night. "Anyway." more silence. Deeper, prolonged. "I fell on someone today."

Someone: a boy with blonde hair and grey-whisper eyes, a boy withFrederick's copycat smile but without his terrifying association with Duane. 

Alice and Rowan looked at each other. Back at their younger step-sister. Then Alice shook her hair out and scooted closer, cigarette hanging from the tips of her fingers, and Rowan slid the ring back through her nose and began tapping patterns against the potted cactus plants.

"Do tell," said Alice, with a touch of relief. "I've shared enough for one evening."