Some Place Better Than Here

Chapter 17: Changing of the Guards

From a deep, quiet place, I heard Max's shoe fall into the water.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with guilt. Felt it crawl up inside of me as the vision of Mary's hair, cascading over her naked shoulders, flashed in my mind. "Why wouldn't you just come talk to me about this?"

"I TRIED FUCKING TALKING TO YOU!

YOU WOULDN'T LISTEN!"

"Oh—fuck off. I ran to get you that night but you decided to have a temper-tantrum over some girl who didn't want a stupid street sign."

"Fuck you, man," Max said then stomped towards his bike.

"Max! What the hell? You said all that shit about me? What even happened with Roxanne anyways? Max? Max!"

But Max just ignored me. Got on his bike, and rode away.

==========MARY==========

It was a normal afternoon in the white seaside shack with the broken railing that wrapped around the porch AKA my house. Which was a bad thing. No, not the broken railing—I'd gotten used to the fact that unless I took a brush and white paint, or a hammer and nails, that stupid porch would continue to look like shit. The bad thing was that I said it was a "normal afternoon." If I said that it was an abnormal afternoon or an unordinary afternoon, then there was hope. But when your normal is most other people's abnormal or unordinary, that's a bad thing.

So, it was a normal day, and this is how it began:

Woke up. Decided to stay in bed even though I was awake. Watched Real Housewives of Albuquerque. Showered. Poured myself a bowl of cereal. Argued with the phone company again about my phone. Watched more TV. Contemplated about changing service providers. But then decided that I was still too poor.

And then while skimming through some celebrity tabloid magazine that I had grabbed from work, Jim came home from God Knows Where. I then decided that my room needed reorganizing for the thousandth time that week, and began doing that.

I know my neat-freakness was just a side effect of my OCD, but the garbage dump of my house was enough to drive me half mental. So, the least I could do to keep myself sane was keeping my room looking somewhat nice.

But it was during the pulling out of all my old clothes from my closet, that my normal afternoon began.

"MARY!" Jim yelled from the kitchen.

"YEAH?" through my closed, thin-as-paper door, I shouted back. My house was tiny. It wasn't very hard to hear each other, so shouting was totally unnecessary on both our ends, but we did it anyway.

"Didj'you touch my work jacket?"

Like, why the hell would I have touched your work jacket?

"No, Dad."

"Alright."

Jim hadn't worked in two months since he jammed his foot on a pipeline—or something—that he'd been working on, and so was off on worker's comp. What he did with his newfound (paid for) free time, was a bigger mystery than the whole chicken or the egg debacle. At least when Jim worked the odd construction job here or there, or joined-in on some ridiculous business venture one of his drinking buddies schemed up, I could schedule my coming in's and out's a lot easier.

For all that summer, whenever I wanted to go out, I had to verify if I was "allowed." Such as that night me and Danny were supposed to go to the mall. Apparently, that night of the mall-date I looked like a whore. So I was "grounded" in order to be taught a lesson in not looking like a whore. I had no clue skinny jeans and a tank top made me look like a whore. Silly me.