156 Brillantly mature, Miss Harper!
157 I pretty much do everything slowly in Violet Meadows. Nobody likes a show-off.
158 “Like we discussed!!!!” Mr. Bush, please pay Loretta Schumacher two hundred bucks an hour for all the time she’s spent with me, all the guidance she’s provided me, and for all the word vomit of mine she’s kindly mopped up. Yours, AH.
159 I’ve never even been to a circus.
160 Unreasonable knitting-group-joining pressure. Proposed lying about third-grader haikus. Lack of Loretta enthusiasm. Big-time chicken skepticism. Lack of Helen death empathy. Flores death secret keeping and other vastly less serious secret keeping about Jayna Austin, First Captain of Sexiness. And probably fifty more ridiculous little things I can’t remember now. What a troublemaker I’ve been. Sheesh.
161 Not a chicken dying or a chicken-finger-fakeout death or the revelation of a shared past that didn’t matter because Alden (a stranger) is dead. No. SOMETHING THAT WAS ACTUALLY AFFECTING ME.
162 Title of this chapter purposefully withheld. ☺
163 I could probably ruin one of those indestructible, waterproof, Gore-Tex jackets with just a drop of my toxic saliva.
164 A Riesling. Month two of the Chesalon club. I already ate the fancy blue cheese. The remnants of it are now preparing to further their aging process in the controlled environment of my vacuum bag.
165 This appendix was brought to you by Gus Warren, the letter H, the number 2, and the letter O.
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