Perky

by Julia Kent

  Okay. Maybe that was just in my imagination.

  “If the opossum were rabid, wouldn't Parker need a rabies injection series?” Mallory asks, her brain clearly more focused on the science part than the revenge part.

  “Did I–was I talking aloud?” I ask, burying my face in my coffee cup, taste buds screaming for a smoke.

  “You muttered.” Mallory fishes around in her purse and pulls out a blister pack. “Here.”

  It's nicotine gum. I'm dumbfounded. “You carry this in your purse? You don't smoke. Never did.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why?” The car dips into a rut. Jolene the Quantum Woo-man lives in the middle of nowhere. I didn't know Boston had suburbs with woods this thick. Her driveway is starting to feel like one of those access roads to a water treatment plant where no one goes on Friday and Saturday nights, so it's safe to hide there and smoke pot.

  Not that I'd know anything about that.

  “It's for you,” she says as I take the gum gratefully and pop one in my mouth. “You left it at my apartment a few weeks ago and I've been meaning to give it to you.”

  “Thank you!”

  “And for the record,” she says with an uptight sniff, “if you're not a nicotine addict, one piece is like taking twelve NoDoz. I didn't sleep for twenty-nine hours.”

  “Why were you chewing my smoking-cessation gum?”

  “I thought it was the regular kind!” Shifty eyes drift to the gum. “But I cleaned the apartment so well. Who knew you could remove the floor vents and use a Q-tip and hand sanitizer gel to get every speck of dust out of them?”

  “Only you, Mal. Leave my nicotine alone.”

  “I promise!” She sips more coffee. “Caffeine is my favorite upper.”

  “What's your favorite downer?”

  “Orgasms.”

  Fiona sighs, a sound that turns to a growl. “Can we please stop talking about all the sex you're getting? It's really unfair.” There's a muddy spot in the driveway, forcing Fi to rev and lurch the car forward.

  “How is it unfair?”

  “Because I'm not getting any.”

  “It isn't a zero-sum game.”

  “No. It's a zero-sum orgasm, though. The sum of orgasms I'm having with anyone other than my hands and items made in China is zero.”

  I'm gobsmacked. Horrified. Chagrined and hurt. “You buy sex toys made in China? We've talked about this before! Women are enslaved in the factories!” A full-body flush takes over, all my emotions needing an outlet. Fiona's foot just went into her mouth anyway, so why not shove it all the way in and stretch those hamstrings?

  Mallory and Fiona both groan. They sound like Fi and me when Mal wants to eat tacos.

  “The factories use slave labor! The women are wildly underpaid to make the mushroom ridges on those jelly dildos. And the nickel in the tools is–”

  “TOPIC CHANGE!” Fiona shouts. “Let's talk about your insane plan to screw Parker and make a sex tape that you'll leak to the media because you can't manage your inner emotional states and are fixated on revenge as a psychological coping strategy.”

  Can you tell she majored in human development in college?

  “My plan is not insane!”

  “That's the part you object to, Perk?” Mallory says with a head shake, her auburn curls a split-second behind her movement. I take a good look and realize the back of her head looks like a shredded pot scrubber.

  Sexhead.

  “My plan is perfectly rational,” I contend as the idea of sexhead makes me think of Parker again.

  “You're going to screw the guy and then ruin his political career!”

  “It's not like I won't enjoy the revenge sex!” I sputter. “There's something in it for me. Pure pleasure.”

  “Why can't that be enough?” Mal questions. “Why can't you just hook up with him to see if you can work things out?”

  “Because he betrayed me!”

  “And betraying him right back is going to... what?”

  “Make me feel better.”

  “No. It won't. An orgasm will. But not revenge.”

  “Would you two stop saying the same thing over and over?”

  “Then stop doing the same thing over and over, Perk!” Mallory shouts.

  “This is the opposite of what I did five years ago!” I slam the dashboard with both hands. “I was passive then!”

  “SHHHH! Here it is!” The turn onto a dirt and gravel parking lot strip, the kind that holds three or four cars at the edge of a lawn, makes the car drop slightly, the tire settling into a deep impression that must turn into a small kiddie pool during spring rains. The land around the parking spot is rustic, to say the least.

  No HGTV-obsessed owner lives here.

  “Does she run an apiary? What's with all the buzzing?” I ask, my ears feeling like someone's blowing on them with a tiny fan.

  As Fiona turns off the car, some of it stops instantly, but maybe twenty percent remains.

  Mal and Fi look at each other, perplexed. “What buzzing?” Mal finally says.

  “You don't hear that?” My ears pop, a high-pitched sound filling just one, the buzzing converted to something brasher, bolder, more specific. Looking around, I see a broken tree, glacial boulders, aged and moss-covered, the rocks jutting out at completely random spots in an overgrown yard. Every wildflower from daylilies to brown-eyed Susans to dandelions is blooming everywhere, and I really do start to worry about a giant swarm of bees or wasps.

  “All I hear is you whining,” Fiona grumbles.

  An owl in human form greets us, descending from a small glass-enclosed deck off the house. Her thick, shoulder-length hair is grey and brown with tufts of white, and she wears big, round, black-framed glasses.

  “Jolene!” Fiona gasps, folding herself into the mother of all hugs. The older woman's long hair, no strand the same color as the next, covers Fi's bare arms like a wing.

  “Hello!” Jolene says with a hearty chuckle, voice firm and no-nonsense at the same time it exudes love. “How wonderful to see you again and for you to bring two insightful friends!”

  Insightful?

  Mallory's mouth quirks up at the comment, eyeing me like we're in on some sort of joke.

  Jolene takes one look at me and goes dead still. You know why she's staring at me like that?

  Because of two dogs humping on a pillow over my head.

  Even Fiona's energy dowser intuitive healer has seen that damn meme.

  Bracing myself, I get ready to explain.

  “You hear it,” she says, moving only her lips, the effect as disconcerting as the high-pitched sound ringing in my ears.

  The one she knows I can hear.

  “Yes.”

  “But you two cannot.” She looks at Mal and Fi, whose eyebrows go in nine thousand directions, all of them confused.

  No words comes out of her mouth about the meme. She doesn't recognize me.

  At least, not for that.

  “Do you live near an electrical substation?” I ask. “Because sometimes those high-tension wires–”

  “Make you vibrate?”

  “They hurt everyone's ears,” I answer, confused about the question, pulling my hair back into a ponytail with nervous hands.

  Fiona shakes her head slowly. “No, Perk. They don't.” Mallory joins her, heads moving in sync.

  A sudden awareness creeps over me, skin crawling as Jolene studies me, arms in the air like I’m doing the Macarena. Wise eyes take me in without judgment, though she has to be evaluating the who and why and how of me. She carries her thin frame with ramrod-straight posture, as if decades of proper training turned her into a caricature.

  “Come in! Come in! Let's have some tulsi tea.”

  Now, my mother has steeped us thoroughly in the woo. We've had Reiki healers and witches and even a breatharian come to our house, all working to make life smooth and harmonious.

  We're so well steeped, in fact, we're basically woo tea bags.

  But
I've never, ever actually felt the woo before.

  This is new territory.

  “Here.” Jolene stops in front of the stairs up to the deck, next to a small patch of grass. She sits on the bottom step and starts taking her shoes and socks off.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You need to earth.”

  “To... earth? Earth is a verb now?”

  She nods, thick hair shaking out in the wind, an agreeable entourage of keratin attached to her head. “Earthing. You're really distressed. Spending too much time disconnected from your roots.”

  “I am not disconnected from my–”

  “Let's walk.”

  “Here? Barefoot? On your grass?”

  “That's the point of earthing.”

  “What about ticks?” Mal asks. Lyme disease is endemic in our part of Massachusetts. Mallory can be anal retentive, but the question is valid.

  “I have an amethyst foot bath for you when we go inside. No problem. We'll catch any that are out there.”

  Mallory has been out-OCD'd by the energy healer. Huh.

  “Besides, the opossums do a great job in our containment zone.”

  Opossums?

  “Containment?” Mallory gasps. Is she swooning a little?

  “Opossums?” My bizarre mutterings on the drive here flicker through my mind. Why would I think about doing evil things with an opossum to torment Parker on the drive here and then have a quantum healer mention the very same obscure animal just a little while later?

  Coincidence?

  The second our bare feet hit the grass, I swear Mallory's shoulders drop six inches. Inhaling deeply, she tips her face to the sun. The gesture is infectious. I join her, like a group where one person yawns and the rest cannot help themselves.

  And just like that, the high-pitched sound disappears.

  “There you go,” Jolene says, her hand on my shoulder as if steadying me. “Much better.”

  She's right.

  I am.

  One of Fi's eyebrows cocks high, as if to say See? I told you so.

  I return the gesture, but barely holding back from using my middle finger instead of my eyebrow. I just needed to pop my ears. I'm sure that's all it was.

  “Let's take a few cleansing breaths,” Jolene begins, closing her eyes. All the muscles in her face go slack, the change as engaging as it is alarming. Watching other people shift their emotional states feels vulnerable.

  Not for them. For me.

  Instead of closing my eyes, I look at the three of them.

  And feel.

  We're standing on the grass, maybe fifty feet from the steps, a breeze blowing our hair. Mine is the color of honey, Mallory's a copper that shines like polished metal, and Fiona looks like spun sugar graces her shoulders. Jolene has the hair of a woman forged by time and woodland essence, greys and whites and browns mingling like a bird’s nest.

  We are all sisters of nature, the daughters of one mother who grants sunshine and rain, ticks and rainbows, wonder and torment.

  Life weathers us. Time ages us. Love, though–what is love's role? It can't undo any of the bad. It can't protect us from the deep grooves experience etches into us.

  What, then, is the purpose of love?

  And when the hell did I become so philosophical?

  As I let myself watch their faces, indulging in feelings and thoughts that are simultaneously familiar and so not me that I feel like another person, a deep vibration begins and centers me. My skin hums and stills at the same time. This stupid new-agey crap makes me sneer, but at the same time I am watching all of them–even the logical Mallory–communing with an energy that you can't see, touch, or taste.

  Jolene is the first to open her eyes, an abrupt click that reminds me of a camera shutter opening. Pupils dilating like an aperture, she's otherworldly, making all the hair on my arms stand tall.

  She does not smile. Her face does not move.

  Energy between us, unnamed and amorphous, crackles.

  I've felt this once before. Only once.

  With Parker.

  The ground I stand on is firm. The light touch of green grass beneath my feet, different depending on the season, both connects me to and divides me from the earth below. Fresh and growing in spring, summer, and fall; dry and lifeless in winter. Without saying a word, that's Jolene's message.

  Revenge is death.

  Moving forward is growth.

  I can't, I want to say, the connection between us lost. My arms fill with pain, nerves on fire then suddenly extinguished by a force that isn't water but quenches the scorching madness. Only a familiar ache remains, holding me in the unending chaos of not knowing, never knowing.

  A purgatory of Parker.

  In my peripheral vision I see Mallory open her eyes, instantly registering the fact that Jolene and I are staring at each other. The wide expanse of white around her intelligent eyes gets bigger, a growing cloud that stretches across the sun. In her expression, I see the unguarded perception of someone who goes through life in a constant state of curiosity, like me.

  Unlike me, though, Mallory doesn't feel this.

  And unlike me, Mallory carries the scent of the love of her life in her hair, on her thighs, on the tips of her fingers.

  Smeared on her heart.

  “This is bullshit!” I cry out, forcing Fi to open her eyes, making all three of them face off against me like I'm an orc they must vanquish. But this isn't some female kick-ass urban fantasy where the dark, dangerous streets of an anonymous city are made safe by a spunky crew of underdogs-with-ovaries who save the day.

  This is me.

  This is my life.

  And Parker Campbell just showed up in my coffee shop, my town, my world. He crashed the gates.

  Saoirse in tow.

  “He's relentless!” I shout at Jolene, whose expression never changes, head slightly tilted, eyes witnessing without judgment. An invitation if I ever saw one to talk and spill and get it all out.

  “He won't stop trying! And he swears he didn't do it! But then he's here and he's winning Mal and Will over and there are pictures of his arm around Saoirse at one of those events where I'd be photographed by the press with my bra strap showing or get into a fight with a deputy undersecretary for international development over phthalates in flashlights and–”

  “Let yourself love him.”

  Jolene might as well have slapped me.

  Furious, I turn to Fiona and Mallory. “You brought me here for this?”

  Slowly, with a grace and patience I'll never possess, Jolene walks across the grass, her hands kind and warm as she touches me. Magic doesn't quite describe it, but it's close. As her skin connects with mine, it grounds me. Not just the humming or the rage flowing through my veins, though.

  It's like her hands are helping my swirling emotions find home.

  Two fingertips go to my spine. “I don't need to do any evaluations on you, Persephone. Your pain and your energy are clear. You are stuck, here,” she says, facing me, pressing hard against a spot above my sacrum, “and here.”

  She kisses my forehead, and her lips send a tiny shock through me.

  Images of Parker flood me, except the word image doesn't do it justice. Words come easily to people like Mallory, but I'm driven by something else, the rush of my body needing to move. It finds its way through time and space by touch.

  A good coffee against the tongue, savored by your palate. The brush of a dandelion seed against the fine hairs of your forearm. The wink of a hot guy at a bar as you lean against the polished mahogany of the counter. The intuitive movement of your knee bending just so during sex so he can touch that place, that perfect spot as he's inside you, so he can join you there in the space you invent.

  What washes over me isn't so much images as snapshots of emotion, flashing fast and furious. Like hot coffee after a hard night, a warm sherpa fleece blanket in a spot of sunshine during a nap, the stretch of muscles under a down comforter after getting sticky-sweet w
ith, well...

  Him.

  Parker.

  I am him. He is me. I let him in so deep, there is no core of me without him. It's empty, a hole I can fill, yes, with time. With effort. With forgiveness.

  Not of him.

  Of me.

  What Jolene is telling me is that I need to give myself permission to love him. Because I do.

  It's okay to love him.

  I also can't let this go until I forgive myself for loving him so hard.

  “THIS IS STILL BULLSHIT!” I shout at Fiona as Jolene's hands hold steady on me. This time, though, she laughs, a sound so free, I'm not quite sure it's even there.

  Fiona shrugs, tears in her eyes. “This is why you're not allowed in my coven. You feel what you feel and deny it. You know the magic is there, but you repudiate it.”

  “No,” Mallory says, her face torn by confusion and acceptance. “It's not magic for Perk. It's energy. You–you glow.”

  “I'm just really sweaty,” I confess, airing out my damp pits.

  Jolene chuckles. “If deflection were a form of energy, you would be a magnetic pole.”

  “Sounds about right,” Mallory says seriously. “She attracts nothing but trouble and instead of dealing with her emotions, she's using revenge sex as a poor substitute.”

  “The word poor has no place in any conversation about sex with Parker.”

  “Let's have that tulsi tea,” Jolene says, guiding us back to the house. We each retrieve our shoes. I'm suddenly self-conscious. I don't like it.

  I also have a massive nicotine craving.

  So what do I do? I deflect.

  “What's next?” I ask as we walk up the stairs. “Voodoo dolls? I could get behind making some little felt figurines of Saoirse and stabbing them with clumpy mascara wands.”

  “You are a piece of work,” Fiona says with a long sigh. “I bring you all the way out here to appeal to your higher self, and this is the result?”

  “I never claimed to have a higher self.”

  “We all have one!”

  “Speak for yourself.”