by N.L. Wilson
Chapter 17
Dix is my nickname, of course. Short for... well, short because my mother is weird. When she named me, she did so... um, originally. I swear my late father must have been having a Frank Zappa flashback when he went along with her on that one. She actually told me once that she’d scoured every baby name book, every telephone book, every birth announcement in every newspaper she could get her hands on—all to make sure that my name was ‘one of a kind’. And it is.
Thanks, Mom.
At the age of five, I’d sworn her to secrecy on that name. I wanted to pinkie swear (it seemed appropriate), but she said a pinkie swear wasn’t real unless we did it over chocolate-frosted cupcakes and Mountain Dew. Then we had a burping contest. She won.
Yes, my mother is weird.
But to get to the point of this preamble, I’ve been called a lot of things besides Dix over the years. Dickhead had his favorites, Dixieshit of course being a most recent addition to the ever-growing list. My first boyfriend used to call me DixieDoo. I know—gag. But I was thirteen and in love. In my defense, I called him Pookieboo, which made the love poems easier to write. But even back then when I dubbed him Pookieboo, it was largely in case I needed to blackmail him at some future point to keep him quiet about DixieDoo. (Hey, I might have been young and in love, but I was always a realist.) And then there was “the girl”. That’s what the guys at the old detective agency used to call me. And let’s not forget the men I’ve busted the last six months of business. Oh, you’d better believe they all had colorful names for me.
Yet, what Ned Weatherby called me when he came home to find me scooting around from the back of his house, hell-bent on grabbing the real estate sign and getting my butt out of there, I’d never heard before. And sincerely hoped to never hear again.
