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Was he cheating on me with her, or, more likely, on her with me?
They looked to be about the same age.
He hadn’t seemed very happy to see her, but then, he wouldn’t be, would he? Not if he was caught screwing around.
Still, it didn’t sit right.
As I far as I knew, Seth didn’t really do relationships, in the traditional sense. The chances of him having a wife were nil. I would have heard about that.
She could have been a girlfriend.
Whatever was going on, I knew I had to get away quickly. Otherwise things were going to get really bad really fast.
As I was looking for my mask, I found the letter that Harrison, the nurse, had written for me.
Well, that was an upside.
At least if I got caught on the street after lockdown, I wouldn’t be arrested instantly.
The letter combined with the mask would probably get me off with a warning and an order to go home.
If only it was that simple, though.
Who knew how things would turn out, being that this was an unprecedented pandemic?
I was really stuck in a dilemma now, about how to best get home.
Why the hell hadn’t I brought my car?
A cab was out of the question, as were the buses. None of them would be running because of the lockdown.
I didn’t have any friend close enough to accept all the weirdness of this situation, at least not without question or judgement.
No, there was only one person I could think of to call in such a situation. I just hoped she was back from back East.
“Hey sis, what’s good?” my sister Stephanie asked as soon as she picked up my call.
“Not much at the moment,” I confessed, trying to sound upbeat about it.
“Oh no, what happened?”
“It’s kind of a long story. Are you back in town?”
“Yeah, for a couple of days now. Where are you?”
“At a friend’s house,” I replied lamely. “Are you sure you want to break the lockdown?”
“Do you really think I give a shit when my baby sister is in trouble?”
I couldn’t really tell Stephanie where I was, due to not knowing, myself, but I remembered seeing a street number on the way in, which had had a gas station near it. I gave her that one small piece of identifying information about my location and apologized that I didn’t know of anything more.
“I’ll find it,” she said. “Just get your ass down there, and I’ll be right there.”
I wanted to thank her, but she’d already hung up. I knew the distance she had to travel to get to me was unknown, so it was best if I got going, anyway.
Stephanie was waiting for me when I arrived, trudging down the hill like I had iron in my pockets. It really was a lot longer than I had first reckoned.
“You look like shit,” she told me.
“Thanks, I feel like it.”
“Let’s get you inside.”
“Okay.”
“When did you get this agreeable?” Stephanie asked, with an acid edge.
“That’s another long story.”
I didn’t feel like going home. It was silly, but I didn’t want to be alone. I was still too shaken up.
There were so many questions running a full-on riot in my mind that I was at risk of getting a headache. Stephanie’s sister-sense must have been running at full power, though, luckily.
She took me to her place, making sure to lock the door behind us. She was on the tenth floor, so I felt perfectly safe.
“You look like you could use a drink,” she told me.
“Actually—”
I almost said, ‘I don’t drink any more,’ but something about the way Stephanie looked at me made me reconsider uttering those words.
Aside from our parents, she was the one I trusted most to know what was best for me. Even better than I did, sometimes.
She had known me my whole life, after all, and I wasn’t always known for making the best decisions. Like when I died my hair pink because I thought it would look cute, or when I went camping alone in the back country, blissfully ignorant about how to bear-proof a campsite.
Both of which pale in comparison to my choice of major. Dad was pretty cool about it, but Mom actually cried, certain I would end up starving on the street. If only she knew about my current circumstances— but of course, I couldn’t tell her. I could only tell Stephanie.
“Okay, spill,” Stephanie said, putting a glass of red wine for each of us on the glass coffee table.
“I’m not really sure where to begin; it’s kind of a twist.”
“The beginning is usually a good idea.”
“Okay, well remember when I was 12?”
“Going back that far, are we?”
Stephanie always did have a knack for cutting through some bullshit. It was a characteristic that was seen as admirable in an adult but that got her sent to the principal’s office a lot as a kid.
