by Elicia Hyder
“A rack of handmade, intriquitely-beaded white christening gowns.” Grace laughed, then made a puking noise with projectile hand motions. “All over them. Monica cried. Ariana cried. I’ve never seen such a mess.”
Monica whimpered. “In my defense, I paid for them all!”
“And she helped me clean everything up,” Grace added.
“My daughter was absolutely inconsolable though, so Grace gave her a beautiful new dress to wear home. It was so kind and much more generous than we deserved, especially after having trashed her store,” Monica said.
Grace waved her off. “It was totally worth it. Monica took me out to lunch a few days later to apologize again, and we’ve been best friends ever since. Now she lets me pretend I’m ‘the cool aunt’ to the girls.”
“They love you,” Monica said.
“That’s such a sweet story,” Zoey said.
Olivia made a sour face. “It’s a disgusting story.”
I laughed. “How did you both get into roller derby?”
“The team skated in the Nashville Christmas Parade last year,” Grace said. “Monica and I took the girls. The team was handing out flyers for their spring charity bout. We’ve attended almost all of their home bouts ever since.”
“Joining Fresh Meat was all Grace’s idea.” Monica shot Grace a side-eye glance. “She needed to let go of some aggression.”
We all looked at Grace.
Olivia crossed her arms on top of the table. “There’s a story there, and I want to hear it.”
Grace took a long pull on her straw. “It’s not an exciting story. I’m in the middle of a nasty divorce because my husband can’t keep it in his pants. He’s a pharmaceutical-sales rep and was having an affair with one of his doctors.”
Zoey reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m so sorry, Grace.”
“What a jerk,” I said.
Olivia snickered. “Did he at least make the sale?”
Grace looked up from her drink, surprised. Then she laughed and offered Olivia a high five over the table. “I hope so because I’m taking him for everything I can get.”
Olivia slapped her hand. “That a girl.”
Monica pointed at her. “The money should be a lot, too, considering the shit he pulled with you.”
“What shit?” Zoey asked.
“We’d been trying to get pregnant for about two years.” Grace’s eyes fell to the table. “I found out about the affair when he showed me a positive pregnancy test.”
Zoey gasped.
Olivia dropped the f-bomb.
My mouth dropped open. “Hers?”
Grace was tapping her fingernails against her glass and blinking furiously, probably in an attempt to hold back tears. “Yep. She’s due in January.”
Zoey sighed. “What a jerk.”
“Men suck,” I said.
Grace held up her drink. “Amen to that.” She tipped her glass toward Monica. “Well, all men besides Derek. Monica’s husband. I really think he should be nominated for sainthood.”
Monica’s cheeks flushed. “He is pretty great.”
“I really couldn’t have gotten through the past couple of months without them. I’m really lucky to have a lot of support.”
Zoey gestured around the table. “And now you have even more.”
Grace smiled. “I certainly hope so.”
I pointed at Zoey. “All right, since we’re all getting acquainted here, I’m going out on a limb to ask the question we all want to know.”
Zoey sipped her drink and put it down. “You want to know why I sound like I’m dying all the time?”
As I nodded, I silently prayed that she wasn’t actually dying.
“Last year, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I did radiation therapy and chemo, and one of the chemo drugs is really hard on your lungs. Mine haven’t quite recovered,” she said.
We all sat in stunned silence for a moment.
“How are you now?” Monica finally asked.
“So far, so good.” She laughed, then coughed. “I just can’t breathe.”
Olivia leaned against my shoulder and lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “You OK?”
I smiled and nodded. Her concern for my feelings was sweet.
“Can we do anything to help?” Grace asked, her face drawn with concern.
Zoey smiled, but it was a little sad. “Don’t judge me too hard if I fall back sometimes at practice.”
“Never!” we all said almost in unison.
I sat back and put my hands in my lap. “Who would I be to judge? At least you have a good reason. I’m just clumsy and out of shape.”
“You’ll get better, Lucy.” Zoey pointed at me. “Just don’t quit.”
“I won’t.”
The waitress delivered the sodas Olivia and I had ordered. “Is roller derby really such a good idea?” Olivia asked, peeling the paper off her straw.
“My doctors said it’s OK, as long as I don’t push it. I don’t see myself making twenty-seven laps in five minutes anytime soon, but that’s fine with me. I’m in no rush.”
I smiled. “That’s really awesome, Zoey.”
“Yeah. Good for you,” Grace agreed.
“If we can do anything for you, will you let us know?” Olivia asked.
“Anything at all,” Monica added.
“I will. Thanks, guys,” Zoey said. “I’m so glad to be able to finally be a part of Fresh Meat. Maven—well, I call her Noel at work— encouraged me to try out for the team once I got my all-clear from the doctors to skate. She and I work together at Hope Haven of Nashville.”
“Why does that sound familiar?” I asked, looking at Olivia.
“It’s a shelter for women and their children who are victims of domestic violence. We were the Charity of the Night at the last home bout a few weeks ago,” Zoey said.
I nodded. “That’s why.”
“Noel? I didn’t know that was her name,” Grace said.
Zoey nodded. “Noel Sullivan.”
Monica smiled, letting her head tilt to the side. “It sounds so normal.”
“I know. It’s hard to think of them as real people,” Grace agreed.
I thought about Midnight Maven’s tall, athletic frame, her sleek black hair, and her rock-hard abs. “She doesn’t look like a Noel or a social worker.”
“At all,” Olivia said.
“You’d be shocked to learn some of the girls’ professions on the team,” Zoey said to us.
Grace looked at Zoey. “I heard Doc Carnage is actually a neurologist at Vanderbilt. True?”
Zoey nodded. “I think so. And I know Madam Veruca is a senior investment banker at TennSouth.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Do you know what Styx does?” Olivia asked.
Zoey thought for a moment. “She does something for the Nashville Theater. Set design, maybe.”
Grace looked at me. “What do you do, Lucy?”
“I work in marketing downtown for an artist-management group,” I said.
Grace shook her head. “No clue what that is.”
“She works for the company that manages Jake Barrett. She’s going to a party at his house next month,” Olivia said.
Monica sighed and got that dewy-eyed look that generally accompanied the mention of the name Jake Barrett. “He’s beautiful.”
“Smoking hot,” Grace agreed.
“You get to go to his house?” Zoey asked, her eyes wide like a deer about to be struck by a semi.
I nodded. “Yes, but it’s not what you think. I have to work. He’s doing a live-streaming thing, and I have to…well, I’m not sure what I have to do other than supervise, but I will be there.”
“That’s so cool,” Zoey said.
I narrowed my eyes. “I work in an office and stare at spreadsheets all day. I promise it’s not as glamorous as it sounds.”
Monica held up a finger. “Shush. I have to live vicariously through my friends, and you’re killing it
for me.”
“Why?” Olivia asked her. “What do you do?”
“I teach the sixth grade at McNaught Elementary. Very exciting stuff.”
“Mon, guess where Olivia works,” Grace said.
Monica’s brow lifted in question.
Grace put her hand on Monica’s arm. “Lettuce Eat.”
Monica looked around, confused. “Is our food here?”
“No. She runs the restaurant Lettuce Eat,” Grace said.
Monica clasped her hands. “Oh, we love that place!”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been,” Zoey said over the rim of her glass.
“It’s so good,” Monica told her. “They have this strawberry-walnut salad with feta cheese that I would give up a kidney for. We love your restaurant.”
I knew that salad. It was called the Berry White.
“Thank you,” she said.
Zoey wagged her finger between me and Olivia. “How do you two know each other?”
I looked at Olivia. “Do you want to answer that?”
Olivia picked up her glass. “You go ahead.”
“We’ve known each other almost all our lives,” I said. “We grew up in a little town called Riverbend on the Tennessee River. It’s really small, and everybody knows everybody. She was a couple of years ahead of me in school, and when she graduated, she moved to Nashville for college.”
“College was an excuse. I moved to get away from that place.” Olivia tapped her temple. “Small town. Small minds.”
I’d been dreaming of leaving Riverbend since the first time I could remember Mom showing me pictures of her college years in Virginia. To my seven or eight-year-old ears, Virginia Beach sounded so exotic with its boardwalk festivals and beach clubs, far away from the smelly cow pastures of Riverbend. I decided at a very early age, that the small-town life of Nowhereville, USA wasn’t the life for me. I wanted out.
I had succeeded once, going away to college in the eastern part of the state and then taking a job in Charleston, South Carolina. But that was before Mom’s cancer. Her collapsing health became the black hole that sucked me back into the alternate universe that is Riverbend.
However, to be quite honest, I’d simply wanted to leave our hometown because it was boring; Olivia had actually needed to escape. Being gay in our small town was a social death sentence.
The girls across from us nodded sympathetically.
“We kept in touch through Facebook,” I said. “When I took the job downtown, I asked if she knew anyone looking for a roommate.”
“I had a spare bedroom and wasn’t about to turn down someone to help pay the rent, so she moved in.” She smiled over at me. “I think it’s turned out pretty great.”
I clinked my glass with hers. “Very great, indeed.”
“How’d you get into roller derby?” Monica asked.
Olivia looked at me. “Lucy dragged me along to be her wing-woman for the last bout. She was stalking a boy.”
Their eyes snapped to me.
My cheeks immediately flushed. “I was not.”
“Who was it?” Monica asked. “Anyone we would know?”
I held up a hand to stop Olivia when her mouth opened. “It was nothing. And it didn’t work out, so I really don’t want to talk about it.”
They all deflated a little. Denying girls of juicy gossip often has that effect.
“So was the last bout your very first one?” Monica asked, shifting the conversation back to Olivia.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’d heard of it before, but I’d never seen it.”
“Seriously. That’s so amazing,” Zoey said, dazzled again.
Grace rolled her eyes. “That’s so disgusting.”
The rest of us laughed.
“Well, you picked a good season to join in the madness,” Zoey said. “The All-Stars are going into the Division-One Playoffs as second seed this year.”
I held up my hands. “I really have no idea what that means, but it sounds like a good thing.”
“The teams are ranked according to how they played in the regular season. Then they play each other in the playoffs to see who goes to the World Championship,” Zoey explained. “They play on Saturday, September seventeenth.”
“Have they ever been before?” I asked.
Zoey nodded. “Almost every year. They won the championship back in 2014.”
“Oh, I knew that. At the bout they said she was MVP,” I said.
Monica lowered her voice like she was about to tell us a secret. “She’s one of the best skaters in the world.”
Grace plucked the skewered cherries from her tall glass. “I heard a bunch of the players from the B-team are driving up to Indianapolis to watch the playoffs. I really want to go. Are you guys going?”
“Are we allowed to?” Olivia asked.
“Of course. It’s open to the public,” Zoey answered.
“How far is Indianapolis?” I asked.
Zoey pulled out her cell phone. “Let me check.”
Monica looked at Grace. “I’m sure Derek won’t mind watching the girls. I’ll go if you will.”
Grace nodded. “We should all go.”
I turned to Olivia. “Think you can get the whole day off?”
She leaned into me. “I do make the schedule, you know.”
“It’s four-and-a-half hours to Indianapolis from Nashville.” Zoey looked up. “The bout isn’t until six. If we leave right after practice at noon, we could totally make it.”
“We could take my van,” Monica offered.
My heart fluttered with excitement as I glanced around the table. “So we’re all going?”
Heads bobbed in confirmation.
Grace held her drink in the air. “Road trip!”
We all clinked our glasses with hers.
Eight
On September 14, I broke the cardinal rule of Fresh Meat training. I skipped practice.
Ethan texted while I was still at work to let me know he was on his way to Nashville, and I left early to be home to meet him.
The year before, on the day Mom died, Dad had taken off work, Ethan had come home from college, and by then I was living in the basement of our two-story ranch on the Tennessee River. At least we’d all been together.
Mom’s illness had been quick, relatively speaking. By the time she actually went to the doctor, the cancer had already spread from her lungs to almost every other organ in her body. There wasn’t much they could do to help her, except make her comfortable for the time she had left. It wasn’t much. Only seventy-eight days.
She’d slipped from this world with all of us beside her.
My doorbell rang.
“I brought the booze,” Ethan announced when I opened the front door of my apartment. He handed me a brown paper bag as I closed the door behind him.
I peeked in the bag. Tequila. I shuddered. “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”
He shook his head as he flopped down across my sofa. “Nope. Took the day off. Figured I was going to need it.”
“Well, I didn’t take the day off, so you can partake of this poison all by yourself.” I handed the bag back to him and walked to the kitchen.
He raised the bottle over the back of the couch. “Cheers.”
I returned to the sofa with a water. “How’s Dad?”
Ethan shrugged and rested the edge of the tequila bottle on his forehead. “Beats me. He’s been at work all day, and tonight, Katherine is taking him out somewhere.”
“They were going to leave you home alone?” My volume dialed up a few clicks.
“I told him I was coming here.”
“Oh.” I folded my leg underneath me. “Well, what do you want to do tonight?”
He took another swig of tequila. “Drink.”
“Besides that. Get a movie and order pizza?” I asked.
“Sounds good.” His eyes were fixed on the ceiling.
“Ethan, are you all right?”
He put the bottle down between his
knees and rolled his head to look at me. “Katherine rolls my underwear.”
“What?”
He swirled his two index fingers around each other. “She rolls my underwear up like a burrito when she does laundry. I like that. It helps me tell the dirty ones from the clean ones in my drawer.”
I blinked. “Aren’t they all clean in your drawer?”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
“I like that,” he said again. “And it pisses me off that I like it.”
Oddly, I knew what he meant. Things were different, and the different is what bothered both of us. I had run away. Ethan was still living there with all the many changes.
“Do you want to come stay with me and Olivia for a while?”
“Thanks, but no.”
“What about school? Why don’t you go back and finish? You’ve only got a handful of credits left.”
“I don’t want to.”
I decided not to press the issue. Ethan would move on when he was ready. Dad certainly had. I was trying my best to. “I’m sorry. I’ll let it go.”
He sighed and pushed my phone toward me. “Apologize with a pizza.”
I ordered a large Hawaiian flatbread, Ethan’s favorite, then called my dad to check on him. His voicemail picked up, and I didn’t leave a message.
When the pizza arrived, I carried it to the sofa. I handed him a plate and opened the box. “How’s the girl with the big boobs and ankle bracelet?”
“Haven’t talked to her again.” He chose the biggest slice in the pie and lowered it to his mouth.
“That’s good to hear.”
“I met another girl who lives in Waynesboro,” he said around a mouthful of pizza. “She has no criminal record that I’m aware of.”
“Congratulations, little brother.”
“What about you? Dad thinks you have a boyfriend,” he said.
I thought of West and shook my head. “I certainly don’t have a boyfriend.”
His brow wrinkled. “Then why are you always busy on the weekends?”
I didn’t answer.
“Lucy?”
“Can you keep a secret?” I asked.
He pointed at me. “Holy shit. You have a girlfriend. You’re becoming a lesbian like your roommate.”