Page 23 of Freak
When the first porch step creaked as Mel put his boot on it, Zelda looked over. “Hey.”
He knew for sure, through some strategic questioning of her brother, that Zelda was not his—she’d been born about six months after that night, and she’d been fat and healthy, not a preemie. Even so, there was that flash of guilt whenever he saw her, and a need to do a quick study of her features and be absolutely sure she looked nothing like him.
She was petite, with big blue eyes and pert features that conjured the word ‘elfin.’ Mel was a big, dark-haired ape.
She was nothing like him. She was Tyler and Brittany’s.
“Hey, Z,” he said to the young woman who was no relation to him. “’Sup?”
She shrugged. “Waiting for Brittany to finish her therapy sesh. What’s up with you?”
Call him old-fashioned, but it struck him wrong when kids—even adult kids—called their parents by their names. But it wasn’t his business, so he let it pass.
“Same old, same old,” he said as he scooped a chicken onto the porch floor and took its seat on the old glider. The hens weren’t usually loose in the yard, but the dogs didn’t seem worried about it, so Mel wasn’t either.
“Therapy?” he asked, recalling Zelda’s full remark.
She tossed her head in the direction of the house. “Tarot reading. My mother thinks it’ll solve all her problems, but really it just gives her pretty names for her excuses.”
Mel felt pretty smart when he decided to let that pass, too. “I guess you’re not out here waiting on your own reading, then.”
Her laugh was black as pitch. “No. I’m here because we’re supposed to go into Rolla and pick up my car after. Zaxx was supposed to help me, but he’s too busy banging Gia to remember he has a sister.”
He couldn’t help but chuckle at her decidedly adolescent tone. People said thirty was the new twenty, and Zelda made a good case for that being true. She was in her twenties, but still a teen, maturity-wise.
But pretty tough, nonetheless. That girl had been shoved through the ringer a couple years back, when asshole cops had brutalized the fuck out of her. Those cops were dead because of it, and Mel had helped sink their bodies to the bottom of a quarry lake. That was another thing he couldn’t help but think of when he saw her.
She’d bounced back pretty well, he thought, but she still got a pass in Mel’s book for acting like a brat every now and then.
She didn’t appreciate his laugh; her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why’s that funny?”
He shook his head. “That’s bait, and I ain’t takin’ it.”
After a long, narrow-eyed look, she sagged back into her slouch—and changed the subject dramatically. “You know Abigail doesn’t have a website to sell her shit? That’s crazy.”
He did know that. Abigail didn’t like anything about the online world. She had email because it was virtually impossible to conduct life without at least that, and she texted—but her phone was ‘smart’ only in the most basic sense. Her phone had been built to do smart things, but Abigail had almost no apps on it. She had no social media at all.
“Abigail doesn’t like how much of life happens online. She doesn’t want that happening to her life.”
“That’s crazy,” Zelda repeated. “That means she’s missing out on most of life!”
“I think she’d dispute that point.”
“She’s missing out on a lot of money, though. Can’t dispute that. All the good shit she makes? She could sell that all over the country, maybe even all over the world, if she advertised and made it so people could buy online.”
“Why do you care so much?” Mel asked, sincerely curious. “Abs seems pretty content with how her life works.”
Zelda cocked her head. “Abs?” she said with a sly smirk. “Never heard anybody call her that. Are you hersweetie?”
He deflected with a sidelong look of his own. “Mind your business, shorty.”
That made her snicker like that dog from the Saturday cartoons when he was a kid. “Whatever you say, Gramps.”
“Hey now! I ain’t even fifty yet!”
Another snicker. “Yet.”
He was saved from more Gen-Whatever roasting when the screen door screeched open and Brittany stepped onto the porch. When she saw him, they had the weird thing they always had when they met each other unexpectedly—for just a second, her eyes flared wide and a little pink landed on her cheeks, and he did all he could not to react in any way.
