Breathe Easy

Chapter 6

"Ah, yes. Hellooo, how are you? Actually, I don't care. I've called you four or five times or maybe like fifty times. I don't know, but I'm kind of getting tired of you ignoring me, so could you please pick up? I don't like leaving a thousand voice mails, but you know I'll do it. Camila wants her fucking cardigan back, so either you bring it here or I'm coming to Boca to get it myself. Trust me, you don't want that because Dinah is coming with me, and I can guarantee you she'll probably go batshit crazy on you again like last time when we threatened to burn your parents' house down last year. She's already fired up. Right Dinah?!"

"Yeah bitch!"

...

"Lacey, pick up the phone before I kill myself and call the cops. Not in that order, 'cause that's not possible, but you know what I mean. We need to talk about some serious shit."

...

"Hi, this is the ninth voice mail, I think, and you still haven't called me back, so I'm just going to keep at it to annoy you. You know, this kind of reminds me of that scene from Mean Girls after the party where Damien, the gay guy, shouts out the window at Cady, "AND I WANT MY PINK SHIRT BACK!". Well Camila wants her beige cardigan back. Like right now - hey, remember the first time we watched that movie together was on the night we had sex for the first time? We did it afterward when we got back to my place from your parents' house, remember that? Speaking of sex, I don't want to do that with you anymore. It's good, but Camila says you don't deserve to have me in any way and that I deserve a real relationship with someone who cares. I think she's right. The moral of this story - I mean voice mail - is that you're a piece of shit on the sidewalk and you need to give Camz her cardigan back. But you're not bad at sex... At all."

"At this point you might need to take her phone away," I heard Camila whisper to Dinah.

"You're probably right."

I was pacing the kitchen floors, frantically chewing my thumb nail. There was a sheen of sweat coating my forehead and a tired, achy feeling in my jaw from clenching it so hard. The sound of Dinah clicking her nails on the marble counter top was so sharp and clear, so sharp that I had to constantly fight the urge not to flip out on her for the incessant noise.

Her and Camila were both looking at me speculatively. Camila then stepped in front of me abruptly, pressing her hands to my shoulders to keep me from moving. My legs kept on marching in place, and she glanced down at them before looking back up at me as if I were crazy.

"Whoa, slow down a little. Lauren, it's just a cardigan. You don't have to go all haywire on Lacey just because she took it. I can just buy another one. You should be happy that she isn't returning your calls," said Camila.

My eyebrows slowly pulled together in a scowl. "No!" I hissed. "She's stolen from me before and I did nothing. That's not happening again."

"Well, she didn't steal from you this time. She stole something of mine, so please settle down, and my god, you're eyes are about to bulge out of your head."

I blinked my watery eyes and shook my head. A sudden rush of lightheadedness hit me hard, clouding my vision briefly.

"To me, if someone steals something of yours, that's like stealing something of mine."

Camila smiled faintly. Amused, Dinah shifted her gaze from the two of us, her eyes widening as they held that familiar twinkle. She had stopped eating her breakfast altogether to watch us like we were some form of entertainment

"AWW." she hollered, and grinned real big.

Camila and I both sighed at Dinah's reaction. I lifted the snapback off my head, ran my hands through my hair and then placed it back on backwards. Next then I know Camila is holding me from the side and gazing at me like I was a trophy she'd won.