Sunday dinners always made her nervous. There were a thousand landmines to keep in mind. Even now, after everything, it's the same.
It's stupid. She tells herself it's stupid. She faced her parents in a nightmare with her friends by her side. She fought Oneiron and came out on top both times. She experienced her own death-by-magic-car. Her body becoming amphibious, her eyes on the prize of rot and ruin, the ever-present memory of the things she has laid witness to, dying and almost dying over and over again— she has seen and done so many things, carrying all her petty little fears of not being liked with her the entire time. She's Tiff-Motherfucking-Sheridan. Why the hell is this so terrifying?
Standing in front of the door with the knowledge that her parents are somewhere beyond it isn't going to help anything. But, then— she doesn't have to eat.
"Just go in." She whispers it to herself under her breath. It doesn't mean anything. She doesn't do anything.
She walks away, heads around the side of the house. This is stupid. She came here with Matt. She changed into jeans and her button-up with the sleeves rolled in the car. She pushes them up again, trudges around the side of the house, and tries not to stop at the window. Stupid, stupid, stupid; she looks through the dirty screen to pristine counters. Plates piled high with foods she was familiar with as a child. She was stupid then and she's stupid now. She misses the taste of raw turnips. She wants nothing more than to never eat them again.
Her stomach clenches, reminding her: she forgot to eat again. That's whatever. She spots her mother, in her dress past her knees and her hair down and loose; she catches a glimpse of her rounding the corner out of the kitchen. Tiff presses herself against the wall, hoping she's invisible against the bricks. Whatever they tried to do to the memories of her is close enough. She isn't even sure why she's here, when she knew she wouldn't be welcome anyway. She isn't sure she can back out now, though.
She times it perfectly: ducks down when her mother lifts the glass dish of scalloped potatoes and cheese in oven mitt hands, army-crawls on the dirt and gravel between tin trash cans and untouched aloe pants, pops up on the other side when she's sure nobody can see her. There isn't anyone close enough to look at her through the fence.
The point of coming here was to clear the air with her grandfather. She knows that. She can't talk to him if she doesn't go inside and seek him out. She knows that, too.
She wants to think of someone who would call her a coward for this. The issue is, that's impossible. There's nobody to call to mind. Who wouldn't stand by her in her fear, no matter how pathetic it makes her feel? Drake would burn this place to the ground. He would get it. And Betty would never call her a coward anyway. Darius would just give her an understanding nod or assure her it never mattered anyway. He does that, sometimes: just a nod. Just an acknowledgement. He was there in the nightmare, with Drake and Eliza. He knows how hard it is for her, right? They all know why she prefers to focus on the donkeys they burned or on the Big Bopper's wife than on the other parts of that night.
Even Krista would understand. Even her one normal enemy would get it, and she would call Tiff a coward for anything. Tripping in the hallway and not letting the blood run is a coward move, after all.
So why does she still feel it? If she wouldn't call them cowards for this, and they wouldn't call her the same, then why is it the pealing bell in the tower of her mind?
She hits her head gently against the back of the house. Brick digs into her scalp. She needs a haircut. She should cut it again later.
Or she should leave it long, until they leave. She has to maintain the lie, right? God, she made a mistake. God, what's wrong with her?
In the ideal version of the situation, she would hold her head high and tell them to fuck off. She does it with everyone else. Some rightoid dimwit gets on her about the pins on her bag? Fuck off. Jacob Kezele ties to ask her out at the gas station again? Fuck off. The Time Gnome tries to make her go to some meeting to formally request time off so she can go on this stupid trip with her family? Absolutely fuck off forever. Ivan Cunningham tries to ban a bunch of books from school libraries? She's going to vandalize his house. She'll do anything as long as the fire is burning. She isn't the same person she was a few months ago. She isn't the girl who hid behind bookshelves to keep Percy Mathew out of sight.
Why is it so hard now? Why can't she find the same conviction? The irony isn't lost on her. She can feel the wall against her back through her shirt; she can hear beetles scuttling near her ears. Nothing ever really changes. The ghost of the prodigal son has reverted her further: sixteen and terrified of the consequences of existing, sixteen and terrified of things that aren't consequences at all. How is that she's still living under their thumbs, after all this time and growth?
That's the nature of growth, she supposes. Tiff shoves her fists in her pockets and walks around the side of the house. It's never linear. Shouldn't she get that by now?
She should stir up some shit, she decides, eyeing the back door. It takes her a while of sitting on the ground and watching a centipede crawl before she comes to any sort of coherent thought. She should just go in there and exist. She's a part of this family, right? They don't want her to be, but she is.
Just as she makes the decision, the back door opens. Avenging angel with a plate of still-steaming food, he steps out to see her, steps out to join her on the ground between this godforsaken place and the rest of the world. He holds the plate in front of her, old fork with the family's crest engraved on the handle, hands her jostled lemonade. It's home, isn't it? The slightly-sticky fork is proof enough.
"Matt said you came with, but he didn't know where you went. I figured you were probably out here."
"And here I am." She turns the fork in her hands. Hunger but no appetite. How fortuitous. She can't wait for the trappings of youth to taste like nothing but sand.
"How come?"
"How come I'm out here?"
"Yeah. How come you didn't come in here to eat dinner?"
How can she admit she's terrified? To Andy, no less? He has seen her weeping, but she has never admitted it. She has never admitted she's a coward. There isn't a good answer to this question. She settles on, "I figured I'd just keep the peace."
"That's a Tiff move."
"What? No it's not."
"It's a move you make often. That's a Tiff move."
"No, no, a Tiff move is, uh— It has a different vibe. It's when I do something that messes everything up."
"I don't think you mess everything up."
"Andy, bud. I do it all the time. You could ask my friends. It's a total nightmare. It's where the term comes from." She pauses, clean fork in hand, and considers it. "I guess. I guess it encompasses other things, too. Asking questions that need to be asked when there's consequences that might arise from it— but that's necessary. Someone has to do it, right?"
"How come it has to be you?"
"It doesn't have to be. I'm just the one who does it."
It's a non-answer and they both know it. The truth is, she might as well take the blame when she'll feel the most guilt while trying to bridge two disparate worlds. The weird girl who built a flamethrower on the fly and pretended to be a politician's assistant so she could get information from a comics company, the girl who has personal beef with a thousand things, who is too loud and abrasive to be of use as anything other than a bombast, who feels guilty for absolutely everything she has ever said and done— why shouldn't she be the one to pull the trigger? There's no way to get into the nuances of her feelings on her own utility or to accurately express a purely pragmatic view of her role in her group of what she would call friends.
Sometimes, she suspects they would call her something else. Not a friend. More like a menace. It wouldn't be worth it to get into those shades of being here and now, in the backyard with a plate of steaming scalloped potatoes and raw turnips on her knees.
Realizing her own cryptid nature, she sighs and adds, "I mean... for science bowl."
"Yeah, sure. For science bowl."
"Not for anything else. Just for science bowl."
"I'm going back inside," he decides, after a moment of awkward quiet. "It's hot out here."
"It's Florida."
"It's Florida and it's hot. That's what Florida is."
"Florida is when it's Florida and hot?"
"Yeah." Andy cracks a grin like summer. "Florida is when it's Florida and it's hot."
"What about when a cold snap hits, forehead?"
"Would that it would, but then it's not Florida anymore." He rises from the crouch he was in. "You should come in."
She barely considers it; she knows her place, as much as she despises it. "Maybe later."
"No, I mean— You should come in. Peepaw wanted to talk to you once dinner was over." He grimaces just a little, eyes worried behind the lenses of his glasses. "I'll, uh— See you soon, nerd."
"Yeah, yeah. Love you too, dork."
It doesn't bode well. She knows that. It won't leave her alone. It rests in her chest and the back of her mind while she shovels a mouthful of suddenly flavorless potato between teeth that don't want to chew.
She has to face the music eventually. She would that it were something louder, angrier, more unabashed. Instead, it's just a dirge with heavy-handed use of "Dias iræ." Variation on a theme of a hymn she stopped singing years ago, like a leitmotif she never agreed to. Where are the horns? Where's the guitar? "Come Thou Fount" won't help her when there isn't a heart to be tuned any more than slides.
She gets up, looks at the dishes in her hands, and steels her resolve. Fine, then. She'll go inside. She can't very well leave her dishes out here and make a run for it. As interesting as it would be to grow mold in these conditions (and easy, too), she doesn't think it wise or even remotely necessary to do so. She is no god of dark and rotting things. She is a girl of wonder and barely a god at all.
The organ in the back of her head beckons her onward, though. It trills out a warning: act now or never.
Oh, whatever. Bad things are going to happen anyway. She opens the door and steps inside.
It's unnecessary to reflect on how little has changed as she closes the door behind her and starts to take off her shoes. It hasn't stopped being the truth since she got here.
She expects the minimal chatter to stop, the thudding bass of some unseen saloon jazz player to pause in shock, for disgust to cross everyone's faces. That's the good thing about not being a major player in the story. The truth is a little worse: she gets almost no reaction at all.
Good. That's good. She worked herself up for nothing. She isn't their outlaw striding through wooden doors with a pistol on each hip, spurs jangling with malintent. She's just Tiffany May, and she's just bringing her dishes inside. Aside from the brief, momentary lapse in poise on her mother's part that lets the truth of disgust and disappointment, though, nobody does much.
Everybody here sucks anyway. She decides it as a way to keep her head on her shoulders, held high like she does at home when things get odd and hard. Everybody sucks and she doesn't care what they think. It's a lie on both accounts, but it works fine enough.
One issue: she actually does have to interact with them. None of the preferable members of the family are here, except Andy, who she knows she can't talk to because her parents are around. At least, they're not in her immediate line of sight. Her uncle's probably in the bathroom; her grandmother is nowhere to be seen; and she knows Aunt Samantha had a headache and deigned to go home as soon as church was over. Even then, they might not be much help, because one of two people at the table (or three, because Andy rejoins them, face neutral, overheated, and slightly miserable, sweat pasting his once-gelled hair down to his forehead). Those are her options, then: stand around and look like an idiot, go looking for her grandfather and look like an idiot, or go ask one of her parents and look like a total idiot.
Fine. Whatever. She'll ask her dad. She has a fifty-percent-chance of getting something out of him. She takes a breath, shakes her wet hands over the sink, and steps out into the dining room.
She can't delay it. That's just going to make it worse. Deep breath. "Hey, Dad?"
He looks at her over his shoulder, like this isn't weird at all. "Yeah, Tiffy?"
Her heart twists. Shit. She missed that. There's a thousand shattered parts of her that never forgot how it felt when he didn't hate her. She swallows again, wipes her hands on the sides of her pants. "I, uh— I need to know where— I'm supposed to go talk with Peepaw and I don't know where he is. Do you know where he is?"
"You know, I think he went off to the back, but we could check and try to find him together." He pushes back his chair and rises from the table.
His wife puts a hand on his, palmar to dorsal, and gives him a look. She says nothing.
He says nothing, either, but gently slides his hand out from beneath hers. Tiff could ascribe a thousand different things to the words unsaid behind his eyes (she's our daughter, Ruth; she's our daughter and I'm going to help her; Ruth, it's fine), but the truth is that she doesn't know. Reading minds is Eddy's domain and she has never known what her parents are thinking. Existence is an old trench she hasn't fought her way out of. No Man's Land. Her father claps a hand on her shoulder and leaders her away from the dining room.