Page 10 of Back for Seconds

Women’s clothing was always confusing. Her dress was supposed to be a sweater. Sweaters are known for providing warmth. How the hell was it doing that if I could make out every curve and swell of her body? She wasn’t shivering; maybe the fabric was space-grade titanium, and I was just a horny loser.

And horny loser was a fair way to describe how I felt looking at June.

We’d stepped into the party, and she’d been standing there, aglow in the cheap white lights from Joanne’s gaudy silver and pink Christmas tree. It was like Ed Hardy’s take on the birth of Venus, the way she was cast in pink-and-white light. Thick thighs, long dark hair that hung all the way to her waist, tattoos curling around her left forearm, peeking out of her sleeve. She was twisting and turning, fixing herself, the shape of her body even more exaggerated. And then she’d looked up, right at me.

Those brown eyes. Big, doe-like. Immediately, they swam with light. When I eventually saw them up close, I realized they were light brown. Like toffee. Like brown butter. Like coffee-flavored ice cream—my favorite.

Then the light behind her irises flickered, and there it was. Recognition.

Color rushed into her fair skin—cranberry red to match her lips. She’d sucked down a breath, pulled those lips flush against her teeth. Had the noise dimmed or was that just my imagination? Chattering and hugs hello and excitement all fading to a hum.

The type of shit you see in movies, hear about from old heads when they have one too many and want to wax poetic about their missus. I saw her, and I just knew.

But what did I know?

I knew she looked familiar. I spotted the two nose rings—one looped through her septum and the other a stud in her right nostril. Had I ever noticed another human’s nose before? Hers was adorable. But I didn’t really need the nose rings to know it was her. There was something in the soft, round shape of her face that was so…

It was so JayBuggy420.

That was her username.

I’d seen her video reply when I’d woken up at the ass-crack of dawn for work. She’d posted her video only a few hours before, and there were already thousands of comments and likes on it. I didn’t care that she was laughing at me—there was something in her smile, in the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, in the way she turned to her best friend and clapped her hand over her mouth. Something real and vibrant and infectious. Fuck, I was laughing too.

Until I saw Amber’s comment, tagging one of her friends. So, presumably, they could laugh at me too.

How nice. We were all laughing.

That had slammed me headfirst back to my material reality—back into my empty, mostly cold bed in the very cold, very empty house Amber and I had shared for a moment in time. The house that smelled less and less like her perfume and shampoo every day, the sweet curl of vanilla gone from the other pillow. Gone from the hand towel that hung in the bathroom. And yet I could still open a drawer and find one of her scrunchies. Find one of her inhumanly small socks and spend the rest of the day nursing a lump in my throat, an anxious twist in my gut.

But in that one brief, sleep-addled moment, I’d forgotten that Amber existed. Seeing JayBuggy420’s face had set the world back on its axis. She was just that fucking gorgeous. Even laughing until snot came out of her nose.

And now, as I watched her wrestling with the front door to 319 Venus Avenue, I knew something else about June Rose Alfiero: She lived in my grandmother’s house.

Or what had once been my grandmother’s house.

A three-story, vinyl-clad beach house painted a dusty, sun-faded shade of blue, with the same crisscross porch railing, the marigold shutters that framed the third-story window, the second-story balcony that had a complete and perfect view of the sunset over the bay. The rusted white rain gutters, hanging onto the edge of the roof by a thread, just as they had ten years ago. Beach houses like these were rare, most of them torn down and replaced with gargantuan plywood palaces.

This had been the home I’d grown up in. Like most houses at the shore, each floor was its own apartment with a private entrance in the front or back. My grandmother had owned the first-floor unit. She’d raised my father there and then, when my dad had to take a job in DC and my mom was overwhelmed with two jobs and double that many kids, we’d all moved in.

June’s hair swished around her waist as she rattled her house key in the door, willing it open. It still stuck every time it got cold, that old door. Finally, she managed to kick it loose, giving the white wooden door a gentle thunk with the tip of her boot. Then she was gone, into her house.

I instinctively laid a hand over my chest, over the St. Joseph medal hanging from the gold chain around my neck. My grandmother—Nonna—had given me this medal for my eighteenth birthday. I wasn’t religious; I wore it because it reminded me of her and her saint pillar candles and her homemade St. Joseph cakes and the way her kitchen smelled on Sunday mornings.

Almost everything reminded me of her, even ten years after her death.

“Look, I know you’re here,” I said out loud, my voice low in my chest. I was still a little self-conscious doing this, though Nonna had a way of making it absolutely necessary to address her presence. She liked to slam doors, knock books off shelves, send a poorly timed shiver down your spine.

I waited. Nothing.

“Ok,” I huffed, eyes still fixed on 319’s front door. “You can’t just…fuck with me and then not respond. I can’t sit here all night, either. Poor girl’s gonna think I’m stalking—”

My headlights flickered. Then they went out.

I’m here. I didn’t hear her voice, but very suddenly I could imagine it so vividly, always lilting and always raspy. I’m here, Joey, what is it? What do you need?

Heat pricked in my eyes, in the tip of my nose. My fingertips had the buzzing feeling they sometimes got when I did this. Or, I guess, when this happened to me.

The streetlights were out on Venus Avenue. Many of the houses were empty, shuttered for the season, their owners somewhere else for these dark, long months.