The Art of Losing(20)
“Oh, I thought you meant my hair,” I said.
She laughed. “That, too,” she said, motioning for me to move over.
I scooted sideways as she set the coffee tray on my bedside table. Floyd shifted, too, but not without a heavy sigh. You gotta love dogs for their honesty.
“Your mom said to tell you that if you don’t get up, she’s going to send your dad in with a bucket of ice water,” Cassidy informed me. “She also said you needed to find a job.”
I sighed through my nose, in a pretty decent imitation of Floyd. “If you’re playing messenger, would you be willing to tell her I said ‘Bite me’?”
Cassidy snorted. She slipped off her flip-flops and slid onto the bed, leaning against the headboard, drinking her coffee. “You doing any better?” she asked.
“Does it look like I am?”
“Then let’s do something today,” she said. “A movie or a mani-pedi or something.”
“Aren’t you grounded?” I asked.
She shrugged. “They tried, bless their hearts. But with the three terrors at home, grounding me is really more of a hassle than my parents want to deal with. Getting out of the house and out of their way is a blessing for them.”
Cassidy’s brothers, Loren and Kelly, were five and eight. They didn’t stop moving from six in the morning until nine at night. Her younger sister, Morgan, a.k.a. “The Nuisance,” just added a moody haze to any situation.
I could see her point.
“So? What do you want to do?”
I turned my face back into the pillow. “I want to go see my sister,” I said, “and hate my ex-boyfriend some more.” I glanced back at Cassidy, knowing her exasperation would motivate me, and then sat up. “Fine. Hate Mike, see Audrey, then mani-pedi.”
Cassidy’s face lit up. “Super. But while you do the first one, take a shower.”
I tried to act offended, and I was annoyed that people kept feeling like they could dictate my sanitary habits, but she was right.
“Fine, but keep Floyd company while I’m gone. He misses Audrey.”
When I got back from the nail salon, I went to the hospital for a few hours, where I watched Mad Love and Boys on the Side with Audrey (two of her Drew Barrymore favorites, both of which ended with me in tears—what was happening to me?), and then I grabbed a fast food meal on my way home and settled in for a night of reading. I’d finally gotten that week’s pull list of comics—the new books Dad and I had the store put aside to make sure we got them every week—and while I tried to space them out, I ended up reading them all in one binge, as always.
It was nearly one in the morning when I finally came up for air. Or, more accurately, food. I almost wasn’t surprised when, after finishing a bowl of cereal, I saw the side-porch light from next door cast a glow across the corner of the lawn. I headed outside to find Raf.
“Are you stalking me, Juarez?” I joked. “And can I bum one of those?”
Raf smiled, but it was small and forced, not his usual crooked grin. “Not a stalker,” he said as he pulled another out of his pack for me. “Just an addict.”
I tilted my head curiously. “You okay?”
He shrugged. “Bored, I guess. As usual.” He took a drag. The cigarette’s cherry glowed, spotlighting the crease between his brows. “Now that school’s over, I don’t do anything all day, and I have no one to hang out with.” He sighed a stream of smoke. “I’ve met some people at the NA and AA meetings I go to, but it’s not the same. My old friends had known me for years. They knew all the good and bad and I didn’t have to do this whole ‘getting to know you’ thing. It’s just . . .”
“Exhausting,” I heard myself say. I knew exactly how he felt. Making friends had never been easy for me. I wasn’t a recluse or anything, but I just couldn’t expend the energy to be “on” all the time, especially when I was thrown into Mike’s social scene. It was always easier to just hang out with Cassidy.
Raf nodded, his expression softening. “Do you want to hang out?” he asked.
I found myself nodding back, even though I was already in my pajamas: yoga pants and a T-shirt that said Eat Nuts, Kick Butts. I’d been wearing them for three nights (and some of the days). The yoga pants clung to my thighs tighter than I was comfortable with. Dusting myself off, I also found a Froot Loop stuck to my butt that I couldn’t be sure was from tonight.
Mom and Cassidy were on the same page, for once. I needed to snap out of this hygiene slump.
I followed Raf in through his basement door and found myself in a room I didn’t recognize. It was no longer the brown-carpeted playroom with a plastic kitchen in the corner where I’d played as a kid. There was a crisp white carpet and a sectional sofa in the center facing a flat-screen TV. It was smaller, too. Raf led me to the other side of the new wall, to his bedroom.
His door was covered with tags written in black Sharpie, most of which read “Cheech.” Or at least I thought they did. They were hard to read. But I didn’t bother to try to decipher them further because my eyes were drawn to the huge paintings on his bedroom walls. They were life-size cartoonish images: a piece of bacon frying in a pan that was saying, “I smell delicious,” a blonde girl with a ponytail and bangs in a Catholic school uniform kilt giving the finger, and a puppy sniffing a kitten’s butt.