Tragedy Girl - Christine Hurley Deriso Page 0,1

plow down the twigs and bracken in my path.

“Of course, you’ll have friends to get pedicures with soon,” Aunt Meg says, seeming to intuit my lack of enthusiasm. Damn. I try hard not to tip my hand; she’s been so great to me, you know?

Aunt Meg sips coffee from her mug, then adds, “I know you’ll make friends in no time.”

I nod noncommittally.

“And boyfriends! We’ll be shopping together soon for prom dresses!”

I pinch my lips together. “Aunt Meg, I’m mostly just going to concentrate on my schoolwork this year. You know … try to keep my grades up so I can get a scholarship … ”

“Of course, of course. But there’s always time for fun.”

She rests a cool palm on my cheek and I will my eyes not to fill with tears.

“Sure,” I say softly. “I’m sure I can squeeze in some fun. Aunt Meg, my cereal’s getting soggy … ”

“Oh, of course, of course. Go eat, sweetie,” Aunt Meg says, sweeping her arm toward the kitchen table.

I give her an apologetic look—I find myself giving her apologetic looks approximately forty times a day—and walk to the table. As I settle into my seat, Uncle Mark walks in, his dark hair tousled as he straightens a tie. He looks so much like my dad.

“’Morning, sunshine,” he says, and I’m not sure who he’s talking to. I raise a hand awkwardly in response. He pecks Aunt Meg on the lips, then sits next to me at the table.

“Gorgeous day outside,” he says, and I mmmmm my agreement. “It’s supposed to be nice all week. Maybe we can go to the beach this weekend.”

Oh god. Are my aunt and uncle going to be tripping over each other for the rest of the year to try to fill my weekends with fun and otherwise overcompensate for my having two dead parents? I’m not sure how much faux cheer I can muster from one offer to the next.

I yearn for the days when Uncle Mark and Aunt Meg were merely bit players in my life, perfectly nice people with cameo roles offering infusions of warm hugs and affable questions about how I was doing in school. They are no longer just the people who spend random weekends with me and bring me presents on special occasions. Now, their personalities, their quirks, their idiosyncrasies are the wallpaper of my daily existence. Even calling them Aunt and Uncle—I’d always dispensed with that formality before. They were just Mark and Meg. But now, being casual seems so … ungrateful. I feel dizzy as I contemplate the new normal of squelching annoyances and showing gratitude on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute basis.

Still, a day at the beach doesn’t sound half bad. At least, it wouldn’t have sounded half bad … in my old world. I can’t help but feel nostalgic as I contemplate a carefree day wiggling my toes in the sand. I remember what a treat it used to be to visit Uncle Mark and Aunt Meg when I was younger—my beach relatives! My parents and I would sit right at this table eating fresh grapefruit for breakfast, then grab our beach towels and zoom out the door for the ten-minute drive to the shore. I’d surf with Dad and Uncle Mark, then shake the water from my ears as I joined Mom and Aunt Meg for a stroll on the beach. We’d read cheesy novels, snack on chips, push our beach chairs back from the tide periodically, and basically loll away the day, splashing in the surf at regular intervals.

At the end of a long day, our cheeks rosy, we’d head back to the house—this house—for boiled shrimp and watermelon slices on the redwood deck, licking our fingers and laughing as Felix the Lab chased one tennis ball after another. Then we’d come to the sunroom and collapse on the cozy overstuffed furniture with ceiling fans whirring overhead, crickets chirping in the backyard pines.

This house was a retreat back then, an oasis. Aunt Meg’s exuberance was a sunny punctuation mark on our lazy beach days—a stark contrast to my droll, witty mom—and Uncle Mark’s resemblance to my dad was nothing more than a fleeting, offhand observation, as opposed to a jolting stab of pain.

Nothing about them, nothing about this house, feels the same any more. I wasn’t meant to live in this beautiful sunny home; I wasn’t meant to smile politely on a daily basis during well-meaning conversations about pedicures and prom dresses, particularly at 6:45 in