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Chapter 3I never craved attention until I felt yours.
-Jubilee to her dog
Jubilee
“What the hell is wrong with you?” my best friend Turner asked. “You’re acting like you’ve been dropped on your ass. You’re walking around like you’ve broken your tailbone.”
I shook my head.
I couldn’t tell her that I’d had sex with the one man I’d never thought I’d have sex with the night before that had a dick like a donkey.
Okay, maybe he didn’t have a dick like a donkey, but it was big. Really big. Way bigger than any woman needed. Just sayin’. I also couldn’t tell her why I was sore. Nope, couldn’t mention that at all.
Because then she’d be all excited that I’d lost my virginity and tell me that now I was an adult, and it wasn’t something that I was proud of.
She liked to tease me relentlessly about it.
Then I’d have to tell her who I’d had sex with…and it was all just a downward spiral.
Better not to say a word.
“I slipped on the top steps of my house today and hit my butt,” I lied.
“That sucks,” Turner murmured, grunting slightly with the added weight of the dead body we were transferring from the cooler to the table. “Did anyone see you?”
Anyone meaning my eighteen million neighbors that liked nothing more than to watch me day in and day out.
Literally, I lived in a retirement neighborhood—at least it felt like it. Sometimes I wondered why I stayed when I got so much attention, but other times I enjoyed having a quiet, safe neighborhood to stay in. Out of the entire block there were maybe three people under the age of thirty.
“No,” I lied. “It was early. They weren’t out speed-walking yet.”
Lies, lies, lies.
I was such a liar.
“I still don’t understand your reluctance to leave there,” she muttered. “You’re in a rental. It’s not like you would have to spruce up the landscaping, find a realtor, then a buyer. No, you just pack up and move. Not to mention then you’d get away from them calling out to you every time you got in or out of your car, asking if you’d come help them with a ‘simple project’ that ends up taking thirty minutes.”
That was true.
And unfortunately, it happened quite a bit.
Just this morning on my way to my car as I was leaving for work, Mrs. Newton had asked if I’d be willing to help her roll her trash cans out to the curb for pickup. I had, and then she’d asked me if I could help her bring her groceries inside. Twenty minutes later, I was twenty minutes late arriving at work.
But, it also didn’t really bother me if I got to thinking about it. They were just lonely. It was hard for me to tell them no when all they wanted was just a friendly face to talk to them.
That was what was so heartbreaking about it all.
The majority of the neighborhood was older. They had grown kids and grandkids that came out to visit them at times, but they no longer had the hustle and bustle available to them that they once did.
“Turner,” I sighed. “What is your aversion to my place?”
She shook. “It’s haunted.”
I looked at her and laughed. “I thought it was just me!”
“No.” She shook her head and sighed as we straightened the body bag on the table. “I swear to God, every time I go in there, I feel like I need a sweatshirt and a cross.”
I unzipped the body bag as I thought about what she said.
She was right. There were times, when I was home alone, that I felt like someone was watching my every move.
Then again, that was something that I experienced quite a bit over my thirty plus years of life, so this really was nothing new. There wasn’t a single day that went by that I didn’t feel like someone was watching me. When I was at the grocery store. When I graduated from college and hadn’t told anybody that I was graduating. When I was running.
“Last week I got home and the drawers in my kitchen were all open. Even the cabinets,” I said. “And sometimes I feel gusts of wind as I’m sitting in my reading nook.”
“Let’s not even get into the fact that you can’t get into your attic,” she said.
That was true.
“I thought I heard a voice in there the other day. I even went as far as to get a crowbar and a sledgehammer, but whoever built that attic door put some muscle behind it. I couldn’t even dent the wood of the door!”
She shivered. “See? Creepy. That’s why we do Chinese fat nights at my house.”
‘Chinese fat nights’ were really just us ordering Chinese food, buying bakery items from the supermarket, and binge-watching the newest show on Netflix for six hours straight.
