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Sooner or later, I needed a plan for what I’d do after I died. Short of buying the working guillotine I’d found on an auction site, I couldn’t handle it myself. And somehow, I felt like replacing my sofa with a guillotine would send an alarming message to my friends. That meant I needed a friend or friends who could behead me when the time came—or find a guillotine that was accessible to the public.
Chapter Thirteen
I typically neededabout as much sleep as a junkie on a good long bender. It wasn’t that I never grew tired, but I had the peculiar metabolism that meant that I could do a low-grade activity while my body recharged. Watch a show? Take a bath? It was as if by powering down my brain, I was somehow recharging muscle and organs. It made me particularly efficient, but it was sometimes lonely.
But for actively sleeping, eyes closed and body reclined, I only needed maybe four hours a day unless I was injured. So, the guest room—which Jesse called my room—had a stack of books that were designed to numb me to sleep, as well as a bizarre assortment of chamomile teas and lavender bath bombs. He had long allowed me to claim that I had insomnia. What else was I to call it? “Lack of metabolic need to sleep” sounded less than human. “Fucked up” sounded negative. So, we called it “insomnia” and treated it with relaxation tricks.
When we lived in Algiers Point, roommates for real then, I roamed at night. There was something joyous in that, creeping through yards and sliding into tree tops and onto roofs. I felt magical, and I saw a part of the world that I missed now that we were on the other side of the river.
As a kid in the Outs, in what was once a town called Slidell, I didn’t know that the things that made me that way were monstrous. As a twenty-year-old, I was in denial. I told myself it was how witches were. When I was twenty-four, I found out about the necrophilia that resulted in my mother’s pregnancy. I was disgusted—not with my mother for screwing a dead guy, but with myself for being the child of a dead guy.
My mother’s ability to rationalize anything meant she thought she wasn’t lying all those times when she said my father was dead. I could see her argument to a point, but I guess I wanted to think he’d been alive when I was conceived. I had no words for my shock. Sure, there were people who slept withdraugr. I’d thought they were the ones who looked macabre or something. My mom was the sweetest, liveliest person I’d met. She grew herbs and tended flowers. I mean, if there was ever a human stand-in for a cartoon princess with birds and mice at her side, that was my mother.
I would never understand how she decided to sleep with a corpse.
They were a “fling.” It was “just a thing that happened.” They “would’ve had a chance,” but he “refused to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.” That one I couldn’t even process.Draugrrequired blood. When I asked if she meant eating actualvegetablesor eatingvegetableeatersinstead of people, she was mad enough that she didn’t speak to me for a month.
Mom had her version of answers; I had anger. Either way, she forbade me from seeing him—and him from seeing me.
But he came to see me when I turned twenty-five, and I killed him.
Mom and I have still not recovered from that, but the last thing I wanted was a dead—as well as deadbeat—dad. Maybe he wasn’t always a monster. Mom argued that he was a good-hearted man once. Maybe there was a time and place where he was different. All I knew was that his plans for me were the sort of thing that would get any man or monster shot.
I shoved that line of thought away and stared at the ceiling, letting my brain slide into that space that was my version of sleeping. It was a lot easier during the day when the light was so bright that I wanted to close my eyes anyhow. Nights were hard. My body wanted to roam. My mind was active.
But at some point, I must have actually drifted into sleep because I felt the sunrise at the same time as my door opened.
“Dawn. Get up.” Jesse stood there pelting me with grapes. There was a reason for that. After I’d gone from sound asleep to crouched over him with a knife at his neck when we were twenty and roommates, he’d taken to throwing things like grapes, candy or, my least favorite pick to date, canned vegetables. Who liked to have slippery, slimy, wax beans tossed in their face?
“You’re lucky I don’t wakeyouthis way,” I muttered, eyes still closed.
Jesse laughed. “Feeding me grapes for breakfast? Oh, the horror! Your threats are so scary, Gen. I quake in . . .”
I was up, plucking a fruity projectile out of the air and shoving a grape in his mouth at a speed I wouldn’t have willingly shared yesterday unless it was to protect him.
“. . . fear,” he finished around the grape in his mouth. Then he grinned, popped a grape into my mouth and added, “Con Crew should be here in about five minutes.”
I spat out the grape. “Five. . .? What the fuck, Jesse! You couldn’t wake me?”
“You aren’t usually asleep at night, so how would I know you slept?” He turned and walked away. “Do you want water or vodka for breakfast?”
“So, we’re just going to put it all on the table? You need to show me how much you figured out?”
“Best. Friend.” He called back at me. “Very fucking patient best friend, I might add.”
I followed him.
“I waited. I waited some more. I hinted. You pretended. So”—he tossed another grape at me with no warning—"yeah.”
I dodged, and the grape landed with aplinkon the wooden floor of the room. I scooped it up and teased, “I might have liked you more when I thought you were stupid.”
Jesse gave me an incredulous look. “My apartment is filled with plants and hardwood floors on every room. Do you honestly think Iaccidentallycreated a nest for you? Magic core elements in every room. Nature-filled. Salt-lined windows. And your mattress is filled with sacred earth and lavender.”
My mouth dropped open.
“You rest well inyour roombecause I figured out what Mama Lauren used in your mattress at home,” Jesse explained as if I was the one who was utterly sans clues. He wasn’t magic, but he’d trailed behind my mother at my side often enough that I wasn’t able to be shocked that he’d figured out what she’d stuffed in my mattress.
I gaped at him, though. “How did you get the soil?”
