Truly, Madly, Like Me - Jo Watson Page 0,32
jackal, right? I shouldn’t be worried that in the middle of the night you’re going to take one of my legs off?” I looked at him for the longest time and then sighed. “Of course not. You saved me from a snake. You like me. You truly, madly, like me!” I laughed at the rather lame joke I’d just made. “Truly, Madly, Love Me” had been one of my favorite songs, by my all-time favorite band back when I was a teen.
Cujo stretched out his legs and collapsed onto the carpet. He put his big head down on his paw and gave a loud sigh, as if he was completely and utterly relaxed. It seemed to be contagious, and soon I was also sighing. But as I did, a feeling of relaxation didn’t come over me. A deep feeling of loneliness and sadness descended, once again. And this feeling only intensified when I realized I would not be able to watch anything. Thank you, DVD brochure writers, for using what was clearly a very bad version of Google translate. I read out loud to Cujo.
“For placing blacky machine box in instalments sockets, making wires with electricity color matching for keeping safely.” I tossed the brochure onto the bed and lay down next to it.
“Now what?” I asked the empty room. I asked the universe, the ceiling, the bloody dog and the strange silence of this small town. But I didn’t get an answer. I hadn’t been this alone in years. Not since I was that chunky teenage girl climbing into bed after school with a tear-streaked face from all the bullying. My sister and I had gone to the same school, and what made the whole thing worse was, even though she was younger than me, she was in the popular, pretty crowd. The crowd that for the most part did the teasing. She never teased, per se, but she certainly didn’t try and stop them.
I looked over at the snack bars on the bed next to me and reached for one. At one point in my life, food had been my best and only friend. And now it was really more of an enemy. Something to be wary and suspicious of. I pulled the bar up to my face and read the calorie content on the back. The desire to enter the calories into my app and then work out how many minutes of exercise it would take to render this null and void was overwhelming. I felt like I needed to track calories. I felt like I needed to track everything in my life. Every aspect of my life needed to be recorded and tracked in a neat and ordered manner, or else it would all fall apart.
But I was hungry. So I ripped the wrapper off the snack bar and then tossed it into the air. It landed on the bed next to me and I stared at it for the longest time before I defiantly took a bite, trying to tell myself that untracked calories would not derail me, even though I wasn’t sure I totally believed that, and didn’t have Google to check either.
CHAPTER 15
Evening came around. I’d spent the entire afternoon trying to entertain myself. I pulled all my false nails off, and tried to salvage the things below. I’d given myself two facial masks and bathed for over an hour, but still I was so bored that I simply had no other choice. I walked over to the video store, leaving Cujo in the room. I arrived just as Video Store Guy was leaving for the night. I stood behind him and watched as he locked the door, slipped the keys into his pocket and then finally turned. He jumped when he saw me standing there and did an actual hand-to-the-chest gasp.
“Sorry,” I said, holding my hands up and smiling, amused that he had gotten such a fright.
He gave me a small, embarrassed smile that told me he didn’t like the idea that I’d seen him like that. It was kind of adorable.
“What’s up?” he asked. I could hear he was trying to be deliberately casual.
“Uh . . . turns out I actually don’t know how to hook the DVD player up,” I said, flashing him a grimace. “The instructions for the ‘blacky machine box’ were hard to follow.”
He smiled again. Not as boyish this time. It was a self-satisfied smile that spread all the way into his eyes.
“You knew that those instructions