Living Out Loud (Austen, #3)(34)

“It was a few weeks after my mom died. I was on the subway on a mostly empty train, and at one of the stops, this Indian man came in and sat right beside me, asked me my name, told me his. We chatted for a little bit, I can’t even remember what about now, but just before we reached his stop, he looked into my eyes—his were so brown, they were almost black—and said, An end is just a beginning in disguise. And he handed me a silver token with Ganesh on it, saying something in Hindi before he disappeared. I wish he’d told me what it meant.”

He looked down at his hands. My throat squeezed so tight, I couldn’t speak.

“Anyway, it was exactly what I needed to hear at exactly the right moment, you know? So I got this tattoo for my mom. Ganesh is the god of beginnings, the mover of obstacles. He’s the god of the first chakra, the one that roots you to the earth, the one that governs your safety and stability, the foundation for all your other chakras.”

“Did you know all that when he gave it to you?”

He shook his head. “When I started researching, it just felt right, you know?”

I nodded. “I do.”

Penny’s machine buzzed as she tested it out. “You ready, Annie?”

I took a deep breath and lay back down on the table. “Yep,” I said more confidently than I felt.

“Okay, I’m gonna do a little bit just so you can see what it feels like. One, two, three.”

The buzz hit my ears first, then my skin, through the muscle, into my ribs, and up and down my spine in a jolt.

She stopped within a second. “What do you think?”

I assessed myself. Mostly, I felt the adrenaline zipping through me and my heart’s da-dum but not really any pain, just a little sting, not even as bad as a paper cut.

“I think I’m okay. That wasn’t so bad! I feel lied to. Cheated.”

They both laughed.

“Wait until you’ve had something done that takes a few hours, and then tell me how you feel,” Penny said. “I’m gonna go for it. Shouldn’t take more than twenty.”

She started up again, and a few minutes in, I could see how it could maybe get uncomfortable. My lips pursed. I could feel the vibration behind my eyeballs, which was more distracting than anything.

“Hanging in there?” Greg asked, concerned.

“Mmhmm. Tell me a story.”

“Okay,” he said, thinking. “So, my mom used to have this psychotic Chihuahua.”

A laugh bubbled out of me.

“His name was Jacques Poosteau, and I’m almost entirely certain he was part of the legion of hell. He hated everyone but my mother, and he’d sit on her lap like he was guarding the Crown Jewels. And if anyone got close—anyone—he would bark and snarl and bite and snort in a blast of noise like a hairy chainsaw. Look, I’ve still got scars.”

He held up his fingers in display, pointing at a few dashed white marks on his skin.

“So, my sister, Sarah, was obsessed with trying to get Satan’s Mouthpiece to love her. She would bribe him with hot dogs—he didn’t give a shit about dog treats, only the best for the King of Hell—trying to lure him into her room. More than anything in the world, she wanted that dog to sleep with her, cuddle up and snuggle like a normal dog. She even tried to dress him up once. She had this little sailor suit with a hat and everything—one of her doll’s, I think.”

“What happened?” I asked raptly.

“She got it on him and even had enough time to get a photo with our old Polaroid. And she only needed two stitches.”

Penny and I laughed as Greg went on, “Anyway, so Sarah was a nut about it, had convinced herself that he was coming around. And, one morning, she woke up, and what do you know? Jacques Poosteau was curled up in her bed, fast asleep. She started yelling and screaming, and we all ran in there. Sure enough, there he was, but Mom’s face fell. Her eyes darted to my dad, and then she started making this big production about getting us all out of the room. But Sarah wasn’t to be deterred. She moved to pick him up, and…”

My eyes were wide. “And what?”

Greg leaned in. “He was dead, gone back to hell where he belonged. But before he’d jumped into bed to terrorize that her one last and most permanent time, he’d ripped all the stuffing out of her favorite stuffed animal, Mr. Bigglesworth.”

My face dropped, but I laughed. “Oh my God.”

He chuckled. “He was nineteen by the time he finally took the long sleep. But Sarah made us all hold séances and burn sage and everything for years after that. She was convinced Jacques was still hanging around. She might not have been wrong; we got a cat after that, and I swear, she’d go in there and hiss at corners. The moral of the story is, never fuck with a sure thing. Just leave it alone and let it be what it is. Jacques, he was the surest of things.”

I laughed again, the discomfort mostly forgotten as he told another tale—this time of his brother and a rollerblade incident gone horribly, comically wrong—and before long, she was finished.

When I sat up, I took the mirror from Penny again to look in the opposite mirror. The ink was deep and black, my skin red and hot around the edges, and it was absolutely perfect.

“I love it,” I breathed. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Penny.”

She smiled. “Hey, no problem at all. I’m just glad to be your first,” she said with a wink.