She narrows her eyes and I can tell she doesn’t believe me.
“OK—I think he’s . . .” What do I think about Eric? That he’s sometimes solemn and earnest, but then surprisingly funny when you least expect it. He’s smart, in a terribly logical way. And he’s also caring, endearingly so, especially when it comes to his kids. I just like being around him. Maybe more than I’ll even admit to myself. “I think he’s . . . neat,” I say, finally.
“?‘Neat’?” she shrieks. “What—is he a tailored suit? A reorganized closet? Are you eleven?” She dissolves into laughter.
“Stop it,” I say, although I can’t help but chuckle along with her. “OK, fine, I like him. I don’t know—he makes me feel . . . warm.”
“Oh good, we’ve upgraded him to a coat. A winter furnace.”
The sun, I think. But I don’t want to give Madison any more ammunition. “Can you just be serious for a minute?” I say.
“Yes, yes, sorry.” She swipes her hand in front of her face as if magically changing her upturned lips into a straight line. “Serious now.” But then she says “neat” again under her breath and throws herself back onto the couch cackling.
“Madison!”
“Jube! I’m sorry. It’s just— OK, seriously now.” She snickers on and off for a few more seconds and then tries again. “Why didn’t you just tell him about your condition? Before now?”
“Yeah, because that’s such an easy conversation to have.”
“Well I think it’s an important one—so he doesn’t go wiping mayonnaise off your face and accidentally put you in the hospital.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“Well you don’t know. You said yourself you never know how your body will react.” She fixes me with a serious look. “Come on, why didn’t you just tell him?”
“I don’t know.” I start studying and then picking at a hangnail that’s been getting caught on my gloves. “I guess I was afraid he would think I was a freak or something, or not want to be around me anymore.”
“Well that’s ridiculous. Who wouldn’t want to be around you? You’re the funniest person I know. Especially when you’re on drugs.”
“Ha-ha,” I say.
“Seriously, though. If you like him—if you want to kiss him—don’t you think you should at least try out this treatment the doctor was telling you about? Maybe you’d be able to—”
“No,” I cut her off. “It’s just a shot in the dark. If they can even find the protein—if their theory is even right to begin with—there’s no guarantee it would even work. And it would take months, if not years, to find out. Anyway, it doesn’t even matter. The way I acted yesterday, I’m sure I won’t be seeing Eric again anytime soon.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Madison, no,” I say again, more firmly this time.
After a few minutes of silence, she stands up. “Go. Get dressed,” she says, shooing me with her hands. “We’re going on our adventure, because I dropped all the kids at Donovan’s, even though it’s not even his night to take them and I had to listen to him bitch at me for a full twenty minutes about it.”
I throw my head back. “Ugh. I really don’t want to. Can you at least tell me what it is?”
“The movies.”
“The movies? That doesn’t sound like much of an adventure.”
“But it is! It’s a three-D one. With dinosaurs. Did they even have three-D movies the last time you went to the theater?”
I stare at her.
“Oh, and the snacks! When’s the last time you had movie theater popcorn? It’s been at least nine years, I know, which is completely unacceptable.”
I sigh. “You are not going to leave unless I do this, are you?”
“No,” she says. “It’s part of my charm.”
AT THE LIBRARY Monday afternoon, Louise is in a heightened state of steady panic.
“My son-in-law is gluten-free, my granddaughter hates anything green, and my daughter is now, apparently, a vegetarian—what am I going to make for Thanksgiving? Air?”
She clacks away at the computer, searching for various recipes and muttering under her breath. I add a concerned “Mm-hmm” here and there, but I’m not really paying attention. Aja didn’t come today. At four thirty, I told myself his bus was running late. At five thirty, I thought maybe he was sick and stayed home. But now it’s almost seven, and I have to accept reality—that I told Eric and Aja to get out, and they did. And they’re not coming back. I know it’s for the best, that it’s what I wanted, but still.
“Oh great, it’s the Cat Sisters,” I hear Louise say under her breath, and when I look up, she’s already out of her chair and halfway to the back room. I turn my head toward the door. Stalking to the circulation desk are two of the largest women I’ve ever seen, in height and weight. My eyes widen, not just in surprise, but to take the whole of them in. And then, when they’re still about five paces away, it hits me. An unholy stench that smells like a mix between raw sewage and ammonia. I close my mouth to keep from tasting it.
One of the women slams a stack of books onto the desk in front of me, and a flurry of animal hair flies up from the force and settles back down on the counter. Cat hair. Cat Sisters. The nickname is starting to make sense. “You new?” she says in a voice so deep, I look up at her wondering if I mistook their gender. Save for a few coarse whiskers on one’s chin and their linebacker statures, they definitely appear to be female. As I study them, I notice their outer clothing—a worn tan overcoat on one and a very large sweater on the other—is covered in cat hair.
“I am,” I say, still trying not to breathe.
“Our books come in?” the other woman says, her voice as gruff as her sister’s.
“Um, what books are those?” I ask.
“The Winged Dragon series. Special-ordered ’em from Ling Ling.”
I continue to stare at her, perplexed.
“You know, that Oriental girl.”
I pause, wondering if I should point out how rude it is to call a person of Asian descent Oriental, and then deduce that if they are in the habit of calling Shayna “Ling Ling”—either to her face or behind her back—they probably won’t care. I push my chair back, grateful to put space between us. “I’ll just go check,” I say. The woman’s frown deepens and her sister’s does too, as if they’re of one grumpy mind.
When I enter the back room, I see Louise standing over a box of pastries on the counter leftover from the morning. She has a blueberry scone up to her mouth. Her eyes widen when she sees me and she freezes midbite. “Sorry to leave you so suddenly,” she says, crumbs falling to her blouse. “I just needed to, um . . . deal with a library emergency.”
“Ha-ha,” I say, heading over to the shelf where we keep the books on hold.
“How are the Cat Sisters today?” she asks.
I stare at her. “Um . . . rude.”
“Yep. That’s them.”
“And smelly,” I add.