The Vibrant Years(14)
“I’m pretty sure you’re making that up. Just like you made up JEI. Just Enough Information hasn’t caught on in popular culture for a reason.”
“Popular culture is for sheep.” Cullie mouthed it along with her grandmother as she made her favorite declaration. “Now, focus. Dress. Which one?”
“How old is this date?”
“Irrelevant.”
“Relevant. Because: Do you want him to die of a boob-induced heart attack or a sexy back-induced one?”
The most adorable wrinkle folded between Binji’s perfectly tweezed brows. She must have been late on her Botox shot. “It’s urban legend that old people drop dead due to sexual stimulation. I did not raise you to be ageist.”
“My apologies.” Cullie forced herself out of bed and started riffling through her own closet—a veritable treasure trove of black shirts and black jeans. Binji was right, Cullie was too insouciant for daily clothing choices.
Not that how you dressed had much to do with finding someone to hook up with. Cullie might suck at relationships, but she’d never had trouble finding men to hook up with. A fact that would break her mother’s heart and possibly even disappoint Binji.
“Cullie?” her grandmother said in her gentle voice.
Cullie didn’t want to hear the next part. More than anything else, she hated being asked if she was okay. Who the hell was ever okay?
“I’d wear the white one and ease into the hot-pink one for a later date.” She focused on her grandmother’s film-star face and tried to gauge if this guy was special.
Binji scrunched up her nose, revealing how new she was at this “dating-shating thing,” as she called it. Cullie had never seen her so much as mention a man other than her grandfather. Then the move to Shady Palms had happened, and suddenly Binji was the new hottie in town.
“One date at a time, my love. I gave twenty-two years of my life to one man. This time is for me.”
Cullie couldn’t imagine what it would take to put up with the same man for twenty-two years. The only person she’d ever slept with more than once was Steve, and look how that had turned out.
Her heart rate sped up when she thought about the fact that she had promised CJ a new app and she had absolutely no idea what she was going to give her.
And yet, oddly enough, Binji’s words—words that told her to take a chance because mistakes weren’t absolute, that one could reinvent oneself at any point in their life—those words made Cullie feel a little more confident that she would find a way to save Shloka. “The hot-pink one, then,” she said.
“Good choice.” Binji’s smile was one of her signature extravaganzas of emotion, rolling together pride, affection, worry, and everything in between. “Why don’t you give it a chance too?” Binji’s voice dipped into softness, her kid-glove voice for her “sensitive” granddaughter.
“I don’t think trying on clothes on a video call is my style.”
“Funny.” Binji leaned in, placing her elbows on the vanity, and fixed Cullie with a stare that meant she wasn’t going to let Cullie deflect.
“I don’t think dating-shating is my style.” It was, in fact, the least productive thing Cullie could think of doing with her time.
“You know when I was your age—”
“I know, I know. When you were my age, you had a seven-year-old child.” This entire pushing a living being out of the vagina was so vintage sci-fi; wasn’t it time to fix it with technology? If Cullie wasn’t so absorbed with Shloka, the idea might have been worth pursuing.
“That’s not what I was going to say. I would never suggest that any woman marry at seventeen and become a mother at eighteen.” This was true, and Cullie felt like a brat for falling back on her childhood pattern of melting down all over her grandmother at the first sign of uncomfortable feelings. Binji had always been there for her.
“That was, in fact, my point,” Binji went on, as unaffected by Cullie’s prickliness as ever. “When I was your age, only one thing was expected of women. That we find a man to take care of us. The path to our happiness was predetermined. Your path to happiness is so wide open, so limitless, that you don’t even seem to know where to start looking for it.”
“I don’t need a man to be happy.” Pursuing happiness by way of coupledom was absurd and too exhausting to contemplate.
“I know. God knows I’ve been happy these past twenty-six years without one.” As soon as she said it, Binji seemed to realize that might have sounded disrespectful to the grandfather who’d died before Cullie’s birth. She pressed a hand to her heart and mumbled a prayer. “May your grandfather’s soul rest in peace.”
That was Binji for you, the kind of contradiction in terms Cullie could never explain to anyone. “What I’m trying to tell you is that dating-shating is not about finding someone. It’s about exploring what you want, about learning who you are. It’s embarrassing how late in life I pieced this together. Until I moved to Shady Palms, I didn’t even know how much living I’d missed out on because I bought into society’s rules. You don’t have those rules. So what is stopping you from living?”
“Just because we don’t have the same rules as you did doesn’t mean we don’t have any or that preexisting notions have somehow disappeared.”