by Dalya Moon
I grabbed my crispy bacon and munched away while Sunshine talked about her sound.
Even then, I had a pretty good feeling whatever music Sunshine had made, it was going to be good. And since that day we met at The Whistle for brunch, I've heard pretty much everything she's recorded and it's all good. She's unique and sweet, a bit music-nerdy, not unlike that girl from Karmin, who does the rap covers.
Seated at the little table across from her, my mind started to clear up from the previous night's fun. How had Sunshine gotten my phone number? I'd called both her brother and her ex-boyfriend the night before, according to my phone records. She must have gotten my number from one of them, so who was it?
And what had he said?
I still had no recollection of my topic of conversation, thanks to Haylee and her endless string of vodka-related dares. An image came back to me as Nigel appeared at our table and refilled my cup of coffee: me, lying on my back and pouring vodka into my belly button, then daring Haylee to drink it, which she did, lapping it like a cat.
If that was the level of depravity we'd achieved, I could only imagine what I'd said on the phone.
Sunshine asked me a question, which I had to ask her to repeat.
“What made you decide to get your eyebrow piercing?” She pointed to her own eyebrow, which had a fancier piece of jewelry than mine. Hers had what appeared to be diamonds on the ends. She had a few stray eyebrow hairs growing in over the delicate tattoo, but it was still the most adorable body art I'd ever seen.
“Spite,” I said. “My best friend Courtney, well, my former best friend, has this new girlfriend, Britain, who wanted an eyebrow piercing, and she chickened out.”
Sunshine's top lip curled up in disgust. “Britain's a real piece of work. She went to my school.”
“No kidding. So you know her.”
“Unfortunately. I stuck pretty close to Marc at the art show so I wouldn't have to talk to her.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I said.
Sunshine ran her hand over her bleached, nearly-white hair and laughed. “I wouldn't say Britain's my enemy. I feel sorry for her, with the whole eating disorder thing.” Sunshine then told me all about Britain's reputation in high school, from her giving hand jobs to any guy who asked, to her disappearing for months at a time to go to various treatment centers for her anorexia and bulimia.
My scrambled eggs had lost their appeal, so I put down my utensils and pushed my plate to the side. “Great, now I have to feel sorry for Britain,” I said. “You've humanized her. How can I hate her?”
“You can feel how you want,” Sunshine said. “I thought I was a bad person for disliking her, but the truth is, even if someone has a mental illness, they can still be a massive douche on top of it. I practice compassion, but I'm not a doormat. My advice is to avoid her, but for you, that's not easy, since Courtney's your friend.”
I put my face in my hands. “Nothing's easy.”
“Nothing worth doing,” she said.
“And other meaningless platitudes.”
She raised her coffee cup, nodding for me to do the same. “To meaningless platitudes,” she repeated, clinking my cup.
Nigel cleared away the plates and brought us the bill, which Sunshine insisted on paying for.
“Sunshine, how did you get my phone number?”
Her eyes twinkled with mischief and secrets. “You don't remember, do you?”
Nigel walked past us with an omelet that smelled like hot garbage—the feta cheese and olive special.
I confessed it all, saying, “It's probably no secret I like your brother, but I like Marc too.”
“They're both great guys,” she said.
I winced. “You're not mad? I mean, are you and Marc still a thing?”
“We're done. I'm seeing my songwriting partner now, and we have a real connection, on so many levels. He's amazing. You'd love him.”
In a deadpan voice, I rolled my eyes and said, “I probably would.” Then I waved my hand and said, “Kidding, kidding! I don't even look at guys who already have girlfriends. It's just … well, this is a bit awkward. You know, me and you.”
“Life is awkward,” she said. “Beats boring.”
“I love your eyebrow tattoo.”
She got a big, goofy grin, and I saw the family resemblance between her and her easygoing brother. “Thanks. That's really sweet.” She picked up her wallet and keys from the table, which caused some subtle excitement in the people standing in line by the door waiting for a table.
“No rush, just let me know what you decide,” she said.
Surprised she was being so cavalier about my decision to date either her brother or her ex-boyfriend, I stammered for a moment.
She clarified with, “About getting my songs to your mother. I don't mind if you say no.”
I stood and pulled the layers of crinoline away from the backs of my sweaty legs, feeling ridiculous in my semi-punk outfit.
Sunshine waved her hand up and down, pointing at my clothing. “I love this, by the way.”
Flattered, I thanked her.
“You're an original,” she said.
On my walk home after eating at The Whistle with Sunshine, I wondered how many of her compliments she'd truly meant and how much of her niceness was an act to butter me up about sending her songs to my mother, the amazing rock star who everyone thinks is so awesome, despite her tendency to ditch her family for months at a time.
Back home, I changed my clothes, drank some of the pink stuff Andrew had left behind for me, and crawled into bed. I didn't wake up until my room was dark. My clock read 8:15, but in my confused state, I didn't know if it was still night, or if I'd slept through to the morning.
I went downstairs and found my father at his computer.
“Where's Garnet?” I asked. “The house is freakishly quiet without him here.”
“I dropped him off at your Uncle Jeff's in New West, since Uncle Jeff has had his license suspended and can't drive.”
“Poor Garnet. How long is his punishment, uh, intervention?”
“He can come home tomorrow, Sunday night, if he says the magic words.”
“Are those words Uncle Jeff is trying to convert me to Scientology?”
“The words are I'll never touch drugs again, Dad, I'm so sorry.”
Being a little hungover had lowered my self-restraint and dialed up my guilt. “Dad, I took one of your ADD pills once.”
He turned off his computer monitor and turned his office chair slowly to face me. “I know.”
“You knew?” I leaned back on his filing cabinet, my legs shaking.
“The pharmacy is really tight with the controls, and they suggested I keep track of them by counting, because I have teenagers in the house. It was just the one, so I let it go as normal curiosity.”
“Did you know you're the best dad in the universe?”
“Yes, because I have the mug.”
I jumped up on the filing cabinet and watched him for a few minutes as he turned his monitor on again and pulled up his email program. The last three emails from my mother were in bold, showing they hadn't been opened.
“You didn't read Mom's emails,” I said.
He minimized the window and frowned at his desktop photo, which was of the four of us in sunny Mexico.
“Dad, you kind of ignore problems, hoping they'll go away, don't you?”
He snapped back, “I dealt with your brother, didn't I?”
I did not point out that the punishment had been my idea and he'd sorta left dealing with it to Uncle Jeff.
I said, “The thing with your missing pill. Did you really think what I did was okay, or did you just not want to deal with it? Did you ignore the problem, hoping it would go away?”
Tersely, he said, “I'm not having this conversation with you.”
“Haylee and I were drinking in my room last night.”
“Wonderful,” he said.
“If you want Mom to come home
, you have to talk to her.”
He got up from his chair and walked into the kitchen, pacing back and forth, but not doing or getting anything.
Seeing him that upset made me upset.
I followed him into the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea, because my mother makes him tea when he's upset.
“The next month will go by even faster,” I said.
“That's the problem,” he said, pulling out the little sugar dish and the carton of milk from the fridge. He disappeared into his office and returned with his Best Dad in the Universe mug, which he cleaned with the scrub brush.
I was still mulling over what he'd said when he explained, “I don't miss your mother. I don't miss her bad moods. I think I'm better off without her. Maybe we all are.”
My stomach turned into a bowling ball, and at the same time, my consciousness felt like it lifted up, out of my body, and jumped out the open kitchen window.
I stood still, my fingers wrapped around the handle of the kettle. It reached boiling point and whistled before clicking off automatically.
“Is this how it happens?” I asked my father, meaning divorce, but not saying the awful word.
“I don't know,” he said.
I thought of the previous day, when Marc had said I don't know to my question of him liking me or not.
People not knowing how they felt was quickly becoming my top pet peeve.
“Did you take your pills today?” I asked.
He snapped back. “Why? Are you going to take them?”
“I'll take that to mean you didn't. Listen, you're the adult, and I'm the kid, so do I really need to tell you to take your brain pills?”
He fidgeted with the dishes out on the counter, rearranging them into a grid, the way he plays with his food. “Are you going to pour that water or are we waiting for it to cool to room temperature?”
“Real mature, Dad.”
We stared at each other for several seconds before he broke into a slight smile. “I should pierce my eyebrow,” he said. “Then your mother will learn she can't leave the three of us alone.”
“You still love her.”
“Of course I do.” He rubbed his stomach. “I didn't have any lunch. You know I get bleak when I haven't eaten.”
“No kidding.” I quickly pulled a container of leftover soup from the fridge and dumped it into a bowl. I set the microwave for two minutes, pushed the button, and we both dashed out of the kitchen.
We waited on the other side of the wall for the microwave to beep.
My father has an irrational fear of the radiation from the microwave, and refuses to be in the same room when it's running. He knows it's a silly thing to be scared of, but once a fear takes hold in your brain, it's hard to get rid of. He has passed that fear on to both of his kids, because neither of us will stay in the kitchen during microwaving.
“We're a strange bunch,” he said to me.
I wondered how Garnet was enjoying his scared-straight intervention with Uncle Jeff.
“It's St. Patrick's Day,” I said.
“Woo hoo,” he said sarcastically.
“You're not meeting your friends? Aren't some of them Irish? Isn't it required by law that you go out and drink green beer?”
He shifted uneasily. “I'm getting too old for that shit.”
I'd never noticed before, but some of his hair, what he had left, was turning gray near his temples.
“Maybe next year,” I said.
When it was safe, after the microwave dinged, we returned to the kitchen and he hungrily slurped up his soup. I set his mug of tea by him and he thanked me.
Taking care of him had made me feel better.
That's my role in life.
I bring people food, and they go from whatever state they're in to being more pleasant. If everybody brought each other plates or bowls of food, what a happy place the world would be.
On Sunday morning, I brought a gift for Courtney in to work. It was her favorite study-session snack food, Pocky, a Japanese snack similar to a skinny cookie, or a stick pretzel, half-dipped in chocolate.
Instead of Courtney, however, I found a slender redhead in the dining room.
“Hey, Perry,” Ginger said. “Your friend Courtney traded the rest of her shifts with me, which is fine because I like working mornings, but … are you two fighting?”
“Apparently.”
Ginger, who is older than me by a good dozen years, said, “Haters gonna hate.”
“You really have a way with words,” I said, smirking.
“That's why I get to work at The Whistle,” she said, flipping the Sorry We're Closed sign over to Sorry We're Open.
Studying the sign, I said, “This restaurant does everything wrong.”
“You're just figuring that out now?”
I grabbed some Windex and cleaned off the kids' hand prints I'd noticed on the windows the day before. A restaurant that did everything wrong was a lot like me, really.
“Ginger, did you ever like two guys at once?”
“I tried to, but they thought it would be gay if their balls touched.” She made a shocked face to show she was joking, then said, “Actually, when I met my husband, I was dating his friend. So, yes.”
I gasped in mock horror. “Did your husband steal you away from his friend?”
Ginger turned her back to me and cleaned off the chalkboard, the white bar cloth turning gray. “All's fair in love and war.”
“Cliches and platitudes are not really helping me.”
She turned around. “Are these two guys both chasing after you?”
“More like running away from me. But not trying very hard to get away. They're like ...” I pulled out a chair and pretended to trip over it. “Oh no, I'm trying to get away from the demon woman but I fell down! Stop touching me! Wait, come back and kiss me! Look, I'm naked!”
Ginger seemed to be as confused as I was.
“I'm not explaining this well,” I said. “I've kissed both of them, and been on what people would call dates, but I don't know where I stand.”
“I don't think I have the experience to help with your particular level of problems,” Ginger said with mock seriousness, hands on her hips.
“The one guy is all, oh, I'm so tortured, I'm an intellectual, but I don't know how I feel,” I said, rubbing my chin and acting pensive.
She nodded. “I know the type.”
“Then the other guy is smart and kinda philosophical, but he's also … ooh, touch my manly, chiseled abs.” I perched on the edge of the chair like a pin-up boy, rubbing the sides of my own torso.
“Keep going,” Ginger said, getting out her cell phone to take a few pictures.
I acted out a few more of the scenes I'd had with them, including the drunken text messages from Marc and the under-table knee touching with Cooper.
Things got a little silly, and I was posing with a lemon wedge between my teeth when the first customers came in.
The woman with the Zooey Deschanel bangs and glasses turned to her fair-skinned boyfriend with the floppy hair and said, “You're right, we should have gone to The Wallflower.”
“So hungry,” he whimpered.
She wiggled her Starbucks coffee at me as I took them to their table. “I know about the extra charge, it's okay.”
“Fine, but no mayonnaise on your fries,” I said.
The two of them laughed at each other.
That was when I realized The Whistle did everything wrong, everything you shouldn't do in a restaurant, and yet, people loved it not just despite its flaws, but because of them.
Another group of people rushed in the door, and from that point on, the place was busy right until the end of my shift, with the kitchen whistle blowing non-stop.
When the other waitresses arrived for the evening shift, one of them being Courtney, I barely said hello to her. I sat at the back of the kitchen with Ginger and we shared the Pocky treats I'd brought for Courtney. Ginger and I pooled our tips and split them, whi
ch made me happy.
Donny made us some french toast with Nutella and fresh bananas, which also contributed to my happiness. Never underestimate the power of a few well-timed carbohydrates.
I asked Ginger how she'd met her husband, and about how he'd stolen her away for himself. She got herself a big cup of tea with two bags of the “sickly fruits” flavor, as we called it, and recounted the entire story while sipping the fuchsia beverage.
Ginger had been dating her high school boyfriend for about five years, and everyone, including her, assumed they'd eventually get married. The only problem was, every time they had sex, afterward, she would get this terrible anxiety that everything in her life was wrong. She was too embarrassed to talk to a doctor about it, but she did some reading on the internet and decided she had POIS, or post-orgasmic illness syndrome. She wondered if she was allergic to his semen, so they used condoms, but the anxiety persisted.
Despite all of this, her boyfriend proposed marriage to her, and she accepted, on one condition. She wanted to have sex with at least one other guy, so she wouldn't always wonder what it was like to be with someone else, and if the post-sex anxiety wouldn't happen. She and her boyfriend had been each other's firsts, so she suggested he sleep with another woman as well, just to be fair, and so neither of them would wonder. He agreed to it, and said he would pay for an escort for himself, so he would know he'd gotten the best treatment, so to speak.
Ginger's dilemma of who to sleep with for her one-night stand was not as easily solved, until one night she met a friend of her fiance's. He didn't live in Vancouver, but was visiting some family for about a week. They had chemistry together, and when she mentioned the idea to her fiance, he thought it was a good one. The truth is, he had gotten rather excited about being with an escort.
The friend was not so easy to convince, and insisted on being taken out for a proper date, with wine and a fancy dinner—just the two of them. Ginger agreed, and they had a wonderful dinner. Later, when they got to their hotel room for the pre-negotiated evening of sex, he lit some candles. Then he slowly undressed her and …
At this point in telling the story, Ginger's eyes rolled up and she wrapped her arms around herself giddily.
