personal down time, which people need more than they need beer or weed or even Carter, that she loves so much, heavy-breathing in their ear. It’s hot in here, but she’s cool. Some people would say Steffy was hiding, but she’s not. She just doesn’t want to be around anybody right now, not even Carter Bellinger.
All Steffy wants to be in the world . . . All she wants to be is alone, which is what she is. Or she thinks she is. Even in a town as safe and sleepy as Fort Jude, you never know.
Another girl would think the attic was creepy, but Steffy and Carter and them have had so many beers and smoked so much weed and told so many secrets in this old place that it’s like home.
At this point, it’s better. No parents all undertones, hissing and spitting over things they don’t want her to know about, and no Dad desperately pretending it’s not a fight. No Mom, all smirched from crying and, like, trying to be brave.
Steffy can hardly bear the sight of her mother these days, trotting around in her perky pastel outfits and heavy makeup, with a lipstick line that she can’t keep straight because her mouth won’t hold still. No Mom for Steffy for a while, thank God, and please, no Dad. She doesn’t know how she feels about Dad, the way he is. He is not bearing up well under the pussy whip, and, what Steffy can’t stand?
All this, everything that’s coming down on him? Davis brought it on himself. She found out about him and Aunt Gayle before Mom did, you know, from that time they flew out to California? Mom dyed her hair and bought outfits for the trip – gaudy colors that she hated, so she must have known something was up. You’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid not to see it. Like, from the minute they walked into the house in Toluca Lake. A blind wombat would pick up on the loaded looks, that cunty smile on Gayle, and if Steffy didn’t know it for sure, by the time they got back from a day in Ventura she did. Gayle took Stef and her folks and her second husband Clueless Ed and their assorted kids for a day at the beach. After lunch she sent Ed off for charcoal and some obscure item that she knew would take him forever to find, sunscreen SPF 2000, maybe, or eye of newt. That left Steffy and her sort-of cousins beached while Gayle took Dad body surfing and Mom sat on a rock looking confused.
That night Mom went to bed early and everybody else sat on the back deck of the house Ed built, listening to Gayle and Dad talk about the great times they had when they were kids back at the family camp in Myrtle Beach, the cousins just played and played. Grampa McCall was Superintendent of Schools in Columbia, South Carolina, and Dad never lets you forget it. He built the camp so the generations could gather, Dad said, and Aunt Gayle said, We had the best time. It was like an opera or some half-assed sentimental duet that went on and on.
Dad hardly noticed when Mom stuck her head out the upstairs window, he and Aunt Gayle laughed and talked while Clueless Ed cleaned up and toasted marshmallows for the kids, and they talked on while the kids lit sparklers and ran around screaming in the dark and they went on talking instead of putting the kids to bed, which they were supposed to do, so Steffy was up almost all night. After all, Mom said later, it’s the only thing I asked you to do. This was a first in both households, surprise. The forgetting. They got laughing so hard that around midnight Mom came out in her bathrobe and rasped, ‘Keep it down.’
After that trip Mom bought a whole ’nother wardrobe; she even lost a couple of pounds, but by then it was too late.
No time for that now, Abernathy, Steffy thinks, Dad’s joke.
She is in a really strange mood. If she goes home any time between now and 5:30, when her folks are out the door for Patty Kalen’s engagement party, they’ll drag Steffy, even though the whole town knows Patty and her dad are hardly speaking because he was so drunk that he tried to pick her up outside Mook’s Bar. ‘You’re going,’ Mom said. ‘Everybody who’s anybody