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“Yes, and remember—ask your father for me. His teeth? Hmm?”
She hangs up after that, and I still have no idea what she wants to know about my father’s teeth. Edie waits, chewing on her cuticle.
“I don’t have a job.” Saying it out loud reverberates inside me like a scream into a vacuum.
It’s as if everything I’ve been standing on has dissolved beneath my feet. Without a job, without a plan, what am I even doing?
She watches me for a long moment. Then she slides up the bed and wraps her arms around me. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Is it?” I ask. As it all sinks in, and I let it, my stomach twists and I let my head fall back against the headboard again. “I can’t pay bills.”
“So, you’ll dip into your trust.”
“I don’t have a trust,” I say.
“What do you mean, you don’t have a trust?” Edie asks.
I shake my head, not wanting to relive the insanely patronizing details.
“I’m not married, and I’m not ‘in active pursuit of the pinnacle of academic achievement,’ so I don’t get access to any of it.”
“That’s bullshit,” she says. Then sits forward. “That’s outrageous!”
“It is what it is,” I say. I shrug and blink quickly. “I have no job, no way to pay bills, and now the one truly good thing I had going for me, that I started to believe in… you know, when they visited, Mom said maybe it was time to come home…” I swallow hard, but I can’t finish my sentence.
“Oh, Faye,” she whispers, wrapping me in a hug. “We’ll figure this out.”
I know she’s right. This isn’t actually the end of the world. It’s not like things are burning down around us—except for the things that have—or zombies have figured out the security code. But right now, Mom is starting to make some sense.
Maybe it’s time to leave Portland.
48
zeke
The noisefrom the arena is deafening, but it barely cuts through the haze around me. The defender I just slammed into the boards is still face-down on the ice. A whistle cuts through the frenzy like a dart through a waterfall to clear a brawl. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that happen.
“That was pathetic, peanut dick,” says the defender, Cheswick.
I’ve played against him before, and he’s always a pain in the ass. But today I’m just playing pissed.
“I’d be flattered if I didn’t think you were blind,” I grunt, skating up the ice.
I don’t usually have the wherewithal to trash talk on the ice. But this guy has been pushing all the wrong buttons.
“You hit your girl like that? Slam her to the ground and then just watch?”
Blood pumps hard between my ears and I literally see red around the edge of my vision.
“Your girl know you spend so much time thinking about who I’m fucking?” I snarl, dodging him and blocking another defender trailing Pasha.
He lines up a shot but their goalie blocks it. I sweep around, clearing the ice for him to track down the puck again. Cheswick knocks into me and I push back as we both try to clear the other out of the lane.
“I don’t think about you fucking. But that girl in those pictures? The blonde with the big ass and huge titties? And that mouth, man. She just looks like she’d beg to choke down a big cock.”
Everything around me goes quiet as I slam into him, knocking him against the boards hard. Too hard. He just laughs, his mouthguard flopping.
“I bet she’d like it if I threw her around like that. She’d be begging me to fuck her ass—” he says.
