Nice Girls(27)

If it helped Olivia somehow, then I would have done my part.

If nothing came out of it, then I could be at peace. I had tried, I was done.

Olivia would have nothing over me.



Early the next morning, I crept downstairs to the kitchen. Dad was already there, sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and his cell phone in front of him. He cradled his head against his hands, his eyes covered, elbows on the table.

I turned back in the hallway, but the floor creaked.

“Morning,” Dad called. “There’s some extra coffee for you.”

“Thanks.”

As I passed by him, Dad straightened up in his seat. I poured myself a cup and sat down across from him.

“Are you okay? You seem stressed.”

Dad nodded as he rubbed his eyes.

“There’s always things to be stressed about. But Jesus, there’s been a lot of it lately . . .”

Dad wouldn’t look at me, but I knew what he was thinking.

I was the stress. My expulsion from school, the incident with Carly, my student loans. The fact that I now made minimum wage at a grocery store, my education shat down the drain. He was worn out by all of it.

“Just a rough client. That’s all,” Dad muttered. He wouldn’t look at me.

“What happened?”

“We’re doing a roofing project, but the homeowner keeps checking up on the work we do. I don’t mind if he does it once in a while, but he watches us every half hour now. He even scheduled to work from home for this project.”

“He sounds anal,” I said.

“That’s giving him too much credit. Man acts like some mentally ill dipshit.” He stopped then, realizing what he’d said. He remembered he was sitting across the table from one. “He’s a . . . dumbass.”

Dad didn’t believe in coddling. He wanted people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. His philosophy was one of directness: you faced your problem directly, and you either fixed it or you didn’t. It was how he handled his contracting work. If there was hail damage on a rooftop, Dad and his crew would get to work and fix it, buffer it up for the next storm. If there was a fly in the house, Dad would kill it.

But I posed a different problem.

How the hell did you fix anxiety, depression? I’d carried them with me as a teenager. The overwhelming sense of dread at school, as if each test would determine the rest of my life. The way my body trembled before a presentation and the fatigue afterward, where I felt so tired I wanted to sleep. The days when I held all of it in, until I was ready to burst out screaming on the highway in Madison’s car. The nights where I would eat until I felt better.

Dad said I was overdramatic. He thought I wasn’t trying hard enough to deal with it.

Then after high school, when I was a thousand miles away, I finally sought medication. I wanted Ivy League Mary to be different in college. She would change for the better, both physically and mentally. The medication dulled the dread in my body. It kept the dark thoughts away. It made life manageable.

Dad didn’t understand it, but he didn’t complain, either. Medication didn’t bother him, so long as it fixed the problem.

But the problem wasn’t fully fixed. That much was clear. Carly had brought it all back. Afterward, when I told Dad that I’d gotten expelled, his voice had gotten low and gruff. His first words to me in response: “I thought you were on medication, Mary.”

I was.

But the problem would always be with me, like a virus hidden in my cells. It was dormant until it wasn’t. Then it would flare up.

I couldn’t fix it like a roof.

The irony was that Dad had his own neuroses. He was a perfectionist running on anxiety. He couldn’t handle it when people watched him work.

As a child, I noticed how Dad would only mow the lawn in the evenings. The sun would be setting, and I would be doing homework in my room with the lights turned on. All of a sudden, I would hear the lawn mower engine revving outside. Dad would cut the grass in the dark, a shadow moving in front of our house. In the mornings, there would be long strips of overgrown grass that he’d completely missed. But Dad didn’t mind, so long as people didn’t watch him. He didn’t want someone to see him fail.

Like father, like daughter.



I waited for Dad to leave for work. I sat alone in the living room, still in my pajamas. Dwayne had sent me a text: Hope you’re feeling better today!

I replied back, a small smile on my face.

As soon as Dad’s truck left the cul-de-sac, I went to the wooden TV cabinet. In the far-right shelf, Dad had dumped most of our miscellaneous books and pamphlets: an old cable TV guide, a thesaurus, an instruction manual for the Blu-ray player, personal finance guides.

And an old phone book for the City of Liberty Lake, dated a little over a decade ago.

I pulled it out, dust flying around me. I flipped through the pages, scanning the columns of names.

And then I found it near the bottom of a page. Leticia Jackson’s address.





15




Mrs. Leticia Jackson lived down in the Sewers, about five minutes away from the apartment where I’d first met Jayden and Charice. After circling the neighborhood once, I pulled up to a small one-story house. It sat on a busy street, just a block away from a gas station and a strip mall. In the driveway, I could hear the roar as cars rushed past.