The real reason was that she’d feel like a liar if she dodged questions about herself, and someone was bound to ask if she got close to them. Everyone in Hellcat Canyon kind of seemed to take her, and like her, at face value. She didn’t think anyone had even noticed she might be a bit guarded.
But sometimes feeling ashamed felt like an additional job she had to do, and took up emotional real estate she would otherwise have given over to having or being a friend. She didn’t know how to articulate this to Laine, who would only worry.
Mostly Britt was pretty content with the way things were these days. She could probably coast along the way she was forever.
Laine wasn’t about to abandon the topic. “I’m just worried that if you only ever socialize with a nine-year-old, a ninety-two-year-old, and me, you’re going to forget how to communicate with regular adults, not to mention men. Not every guy wants to talk about butts.”
“Are you sayingyou’renot an adult, Laine?”
“What I mean is an adult who hasn’t known you since you couldn’t pronounce your ‘f’s. How’s that puzzy cat of yours?”
When Britt was about three, she’d resourcefully substituted in “p”s for “f”s in all words until she got a handle on the “f”s.
“He’s fine. And fat.” She had perfect control of them now.
“Give him a scratch for me.”
“I will. Lainie, I talk to people at the diner every day. Speaking of which, I have to get some sleep now, or I might drop plates tomorrow.”
“Can’t have that! Okay sweets, love you. Alley-oop!”
“Love you, too. Alley-oop!”
The thing she used to say to Britt just before she was tossed up to the top of the cheerleading pyramid. Britt hadalwayswanted to be on top, risk be damned. The view from there, she claimed, was better.
And the screen went blank.
Britt stood up abruptly. She realized her lungs were moving shallowly. “Jeff.” Just the sound of that name could get residual panic circulating in her bloodstream.
She deliberately took deep, long, greedy gulps of warm night air, and tipped her head back to luxuriate in the scenery—yep, trees, stars, mountains, dirt, Hellcat Canyon. Home. Far, far away from Southern California, where she had once been happy and where everything had gone shockingly to pieces.
“Oop!” She gave a start. She’d just remembered it was garbage collection tomorrow.
She opened the latch on Mrs.Morrison’s gate and dragged her trash can and recyling bins out to the side of the road, and then she dragged her own bins out, and the physical exertion made her feel a little better.
Then she returned to the deck and with one final bracing breath for courage, typed the rest of what she’d sat down to type almost a half hour ago.
“...Cord.”
She hit return.
GoodGod.
Such a torrent of information appeared, he was actually categorized bytopic.
She tentatively clicked his Wikipedia entry and scanned the headings:
Early Life.
Blood Brothers.
AfterBlood Brothers.
Personal Life.
Controversy.
Imagine an entire life summed up in a series of categories. Imagine the internet deciding for you what the peak of it was, and arranging everything else as “Before” and “After.”