by Amira Rain
After declaring me perfectly healthy, she grabbed her black medical bag and said she’d let me get some rest unless I had any questions for her.
I said that I didn’t, at least not about anything medical, but that I was curious about how there were still any doctors left who did house calls. “I thought that ended maybe sixty or seventy years ago.”
Nora said that it had, in general. “But not when the doctor is a family member and lives on the farm with everyone else.”
Now I was really confused. “We’re on a farm?”
Nora smiled, making her chocolate brown eyes twinkle. “Yes. Seems like Hayden needs to give you a tour tomorrow, maybe once you’ve had a little more rest.”
I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted Hayden to give me a tour. Even though at the same time, I developed a wave of butterflies in my stomach just thinking about seeing him again. In fact, when another knock sounded on the door just a minute or so after Nora had left, I all but jumped out of bed, suddenly feeling desperate to see Hayden.
“The door is open. Please come in.”
I hadn’t been able to keep a little tremor of anticipation out of my voice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It turned out that my visitor wasn’t Hayden. Instead, it was Jen.
Dressed in pajamas and looking a little shy maybe, she entered my bedroom holding the collar of a very friendly-looking golden-colored dog. “Hi.”
“Hi, Jen.”
“How are you doing?”
“Just fine, and thank you for all the new things. That was really kind of you, Jen. In fact, you made me feel completely spoiled. I’m so grateful for everything.” Leaning back against the wall beside the doorway, she shrugged, reddening slightly, seeming to be pleased and embarrassed at the same time. “Oh, that was nothing. See, my dad always gives me a bunch of money for doing all these different little chores around here, and I had a bunch of money all piling up in my bank account, because…well, I don’t shop or go out to the movies or anything very often, because….”
She paused, taking a deep breath and shrugging again. “I don’t know. Sometimes people my own age are just too busy to ask me to do stuff and junk. So, anyway…I had all this money saved up, and I said to my dad and Hayden, ‘Guys, I want to buy some new stuff for Sydney so that she can have all the stuff of home here.’
And they said that was a good idea, and my dad said that was super nice of me, but then Hayden said that he should pay for all the stuff, and he gave me a credit card and a big wad of cash to spend. But then we got into a little fight, because I kept saying like…well, basically I was just like, ‘Don’t you dare try to ruin this for me! I want to do this for Sydney myself for a friendship thing!’
Then, long story short, more things happened, and I ended up flushing two of Hayden’s hundred dollar bills down the toilet. Then my dad was like, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself! There are kids who have nothing to eat, and you just wasted money!’
And then…well, I started crying because I felt so guilty, and then my dad said he was sorry for making me cry, and then…well, another long story short, Hayden and I agreed that he would pay for half of the shopping trip, and that I would pay for the other half, but that I would get to take most of the credit for it.
So, then, he gave me some of his cash, and I went to Sweetwater, and I went shopping. I even got to bring my dog shopping with me, because the people at the Sweetwater Box-Mart allow him to come into the store with me, because I call him my therapy dog, which he is. He gives me a lot of friendship therapy, and sometimes he gives me the kind of therapy where he allows me to cry into his fur if I’m really sad, which I did when I felt guilty about flushing money down the toilet.”
Becoming further charmed by Jen, I smiled at her and her furry companion. “He looks like a really sweet dog. What’s his name?”
“His name is kind of a long story. See, he was living at the animal shelter in Sweetwater, and when he first came there, he was really sick, and skinny, and he had all these different injuries to his body, and claw marks all over his face, and he was so scared and sad that he wouldn’t even barely communicate with people, or even with other dogs.
So, when me and my dad went there to get me a dog to have for a friend, the shelter people said that there was this one dog who was about to be put to sleep the next day because no one wanted him because of all his different problems. And the shelter people told me and my dad that he didn’t even have any friends, either, because the other dogs just didn’t know what to think about him, and because he just didn’t know how to act around all the other dogs.
And right then, even before I saw him, I told the shelter lady, I said, ‘Please take me to my new dog. I think he’s meant to be mine.’ Which, later, my dad said was a very neat, grownup thing for me to say, and he said he was impressed by me for it. ‘He’s meant to be mine,’ I said. So, anyway, the shelter lady took us to see my new dog, and the second I set my eyes on his sweet, furry little face, and his big brown eyes, I said, ‘He’s everything I’ve ever wanted’…and somehow, that became his official name.
His official name is Everything I’ve Ever Wanted MacGregor, although I just usually call him Wanted, just to make things shorter and easier, and just to remind him all the time that no matter what happened to him in his life before, and no matter how mean people were to him, he was always wanted, and he’s always wanted now in his life today.
Sometimes I even call him Wanted Loved MacGregor, and sometimes I even call him Wanted Beloved MacGregor. Sometimes, to be even fancier, I even call him Wanted Dearly Beloved MacGregor. Just like they say at weddings. ‘Dearly beloved.’ That’s how I feel about him. He’s dearly beloved.”
Fighting slightly misty eyes for some reason, I smiled and asked if Wanted might want to come over to meet me.
Jen smiled back, letting go of his collar, which he’d been straining against. “I thought you’d never ask! See, he likes to ‘love attack’ new people sometimes, and I just wasn’t sure if that’d be too much for you.”
It wasn’t, and I scratched Wanted’s ears and petted his soft fur while he “love attacked” me ferociously, licking my face and wriggling against me so excitedly that he nearly knocked me over in my crouch.
While Wanted settled down a little, I continued petting him, and Jen told me that he was three or four years old as best as the vet could tell, and also as best as the vet could tell, he was a golden retriever, yellow lab mix.
“And the vet also thinks he might be mixed with something else, but she says she can’t really pin it down. I think the missing part of his mix is just plain angel. I think he’s a golden retriever, yellow lab, literal angel-from-heaven mix. That’s what I always tell people at Box-Mart, anyway. They always laugh, but I’m not even remotely joking.”
Jen’s phone soon dinged with a text alert, and she pulled her phone from her pajama bottoms pocket and looked at the screen, gasping. “It’s from my dad! He says the pizza delivery guy just came! Do you like pizza? I ordered us a whole bunch of pizza and breadsticks, just in case you do. I even ordered a garden salad, just in case you’re a super healthy kind of person.”
Just at the mere thought of pizza, breadsticks, and salad, I felt my stomach rumble with hunger, and I realized I was absolutely starving. In fact, I couldn’t even remember when I’d been so hungry. So far that day, I’d had only a single bite of dry toast, a few tiny spoonfuls of ice cream, and the square of strawberry-rhubarb cake from the coffee shop. Not to mention that in the previous several weeks, I’d been eating like a bird most days because of my terrible bouts of nausea.
Now, though, I didn’t feel sick even a tiny bit, except maybe just nearly sick with hunger. I told Jen that I was famished and that pizza and everything else sounded amazing.
Grinning, she covered her hands with her face and made some sort of rapturous-sounding little squeal before uncovering her face to speak. “I was really hoping you’d say that. Now, you just hold on one minute, and we
’ll be having a full-tilt pizza party in here.”
Soon we were, and my empty stomach thanked me gratefully. Jen and I ate sitting in my bed, with Wanted at our feet, casting frequent longing glances at our food with a bit of drool coming from both sides of his mouth. When Jen tossed him a couple of thin carrot ribbons from our salad, followed by a piece of pepperoni and a piece of ham, instead of satisfying him, these bites only made his drooling increase.
After wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, Jen scooted back to her seat, shaking her head. “See, he’s a real foodie…but not the kind of foodie that likes real quality gourmet food or anything. He’s just a big-time-hunger-for-any-kind-of-people-food kind of foodie.”
Having finished two large slices of pizza, a bowl full of salad, and two breadsticks, yet still wanting more, I myself felt like that particular kind of foodie right then.
Jen seemed to be starving, too, and for a while we just watched some old movie on a wall-mounted TV above the dresser while we both really tucked into our food. However, after maybe her third slice of pizza, she took a long swig of pop, set the can on a nightstand with a satisfied sigh, and looked at me with a serious sort of expression.
“I’m sorry that I was in a bad mood when we first met you today. It was just that I wanted to be the first one besides Hayden to meet you, not Mel. And she knew that. She ran out of the car first just to destroy what I wanted. She likes to do that a lot.”
The fact that I was currently chewing gave me a few seconds to carefully think about my response.
“Well…Mel may have been the first to meet me today, but you were the first to bring me clothes and everything else I needed…and you’re the first one to bring me pizza. And I don’t know about you, but I really love pizza, so the person who brings it to me first…well, let’s just say they’re my friends for life.”
Jen cracked a smile, clearly pleased. “Well, good. See, I just wanted to maybe become your friend first, before Mel, because whenever we meet another girl our age, they always want to be her friend, not mine. Everyone our age always just sees me as some sort of a pathetic little baby or something. They always see Mel as cooler for some reason. Even adults do.”
“Well, I don’t see her as cooler than you. Not that I’ve known the two of you very long, but I’ve noticed cool things about each of you, so I guess I see you as equally cool.”
Jen smiled again. “Thanks. I for sure got a really cool dog, don’t I?”
I smiled in return. “You definitely do.”
She suddenly gasped. “Oh my gosh! I almost forgot the coolest thing I got for you today! It was all my idea, too. Except that it actually wasn’t; that was a lie. I wished it had been all my idea, though.”
I asked her what the “coolest thing” was, and she said it was a birthday cake.
“Oh, and I even forgot to wish you a happy birthday until right now! Happy birthday, Sydney. I should have even said that our pizza party was a pizza birthday party. Don’t worry; I’ll remember that next year. But right now, let me run downstairs and get the cake and plates and candles and stuff, then I’ll sing to you and all that. Okay?”
Smiling, I said okay, and Jen flew out of bed. She’d almost reached the doorway when I called out for her to wait, realizing that I’d forgotten to ask her something.
“If the birthday cake wasn’t all your idea, then whose was it?”
She said it had “pretty much” been Hayden’s. “See, he called me when I was at the store, and he was like, ‘It’s Sydney’s birthday today, so maybe you should get her a cake while you’re there.’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Good idea! But will the cake be from me or from you?’ And he was just like, ‘Well, I don’t even think that matters, and you can even say it’s from you if you want. The important thing is probably just that she has a cake on her birthday.’
So, if we’re being technical, here, I guess we can say that I’m completely responsible for getting you a birthday cake, except that it was Hayden’s idea, and it was out of his wad of bills that I took money to pay for it. But you can still consider the cake as a gift from me to you.”
I smiled and said all right, and she flew out the doorway.
A short while later, I was still smiling a little, just to myself, although I wasn’t even exactly sure why. It wasn’t just because Jen’s thought processes kind of cracked me up. I supposed there was just something about hearing that Hayden had thought about my birthday that made me want to smile, despite the fact that I didn’t even know him.
Also despite the fact that what little I did know about him didn’t exactly paint him in the best possible light. He’d killed a man earlier that day, and afterward, he hadn’t seemed disturbed in the least. He’d just seemed to be in a hurry. However, he’d killed the man who’d been chasing me supposedly to save my life.
There was also the matter of him supposedly being a vampire, at least according to Jen and Mel. Even hours later now, I just couldn’t quite make sense of the idea, let alone fully believe it. I wasn’t sure that I ever could.
I started wondering if the family called themselves vampires with “vampire” being a metaphor for something. That would make sense, I thought. Or maybe it was just some sort of a funny family descriptor that they’d given themselves, maybe because they felt somehow different from other families in some way.
Even if this were the case, though, I still couldn’t make sense of the split second that I’d seen what I’d later had a feeling was Hayden running through the woods at a speed no human being could reach.
Maybe I just needed more sleep before everything clicked into place in a way that made just a shred more sense, I thought. Maybe I just needed a slice of birthday cake, too.
Unbelievably, even after my very large, very late dinner of pizza, breadsticks, and salad, a slice of cake still sounded amazing to me, and I was pretty sure I still had room. Maybe this is what they mean by “eating for two,” I thought, almost startling myself with the recollection that I was pregnant. Hanging out with Jen, starting to feel “normal” for the first time in I wasn’t even sure how long, I’d honestly kind of forgotten for a while.
Thinking about my positive pregnancy tests earlier that day, feeling like that had all been so long ago that it was like a dream, I let what Mel had told me sort of rattle around in my head, almost trying to decide if I could ever really take the idea that I’d been somehow “magically impregnated” seriously. I was pretty sure I couldn’t, but at the same time, like earlier that day, the idea that I’d somehow become pregnant via magic was a more plausible one than the conclusion I’d come up with myself.
I knew I needed answers from Mel or Hayden, or both, and that I needed to make getting those answers a priority. Only then would I be able to fully make up my own mind about what I thought. Tomorrow morning, I thought. First thing. I had been thinking to try to get answers that very night, immediately, but it was getting late already, and I could tell I was starting to get tired again, and not just “normal tired,” but “pregnancy level tired.” Something just told me I’d be more up for hearing possibly-bizarre answers first thing in the morning, after another long sleep in my new luxurious bed.
While I continued waiting for Jen to come back up with the cake, I sent a brief text to my aunt, simply stating my new address and my savings account number, and asking her to please send my things, and please transfer the remainder of my mom’s life insurance money to my account.
Jen had helpfully put my new address in my phone while programming in her number at one point during our pizza party; and I was reasonably sure that she’d spelled the street address right, since it was on MacGregor Lane, and MacGregor was her own family’s last name.
Aunt Pam had been right that there certainly wasn’t much left of my mom’s life insurance money; she and Uncle John had used a large chunk of it to completely remodel their kitchen and install an in-ground swimming pool not long after I’d moved in with them, saying that these were things that benefitted us all. Then, th
ey’d taken a two-week Caribbean cruise, saying that as “parents” of a teenager, they were entitled to some downtime.
A casual friend whose mom was an attorney told her mom about all this, and the mom had called me, asking me if she’d like one of her friends at the firm to file some sort of emergency motion or something, for free, in order to protect my money and put the rest of it in a trust, where my aunt and uncle couldn’t touch it.
Ultimately, I’d said no, because for one thing, I knew there wasn’t much money left by this point, and for another thing, as I’d told my friend’s mom, I’d have to live with my aunt and uncle after whatever sort of emergency motion was filed. And I didn’t think they’d be too pleasant to me after they found out, not that they were anyway.
Just a few seconds after I sent my aunt the text, heavy footfalls coming down the hardwood hallway made me turn my attention to my bedroom door, which Jen had left wide open. The footfalls actually sounded more like bootfalls, and I recalled seeing that Hayden had been wearing boots when he’d been in my room earlier. Apparently, the MacGregor household didn’t have any kind of a policy about taking boots or shoes off at the door.
Within a few seconds, Hayden passed my doorway, although he didn’t even glance to the side; and suddenly, I made a decision, flew out of bed and over to the doorway, and called out after him.
After stopping dead in his tracks, he slowly turned, looking a bit stony-faced, which I was beginning to think was his usual facial expression. I was kind of getting used to it; however, I wasn’t quite used to seeing a person with smears of blood and dirt all over their clothes and face, like how I was currently seeing Hayden for the second time that day.
Earlier, when he’d come in my room, he’d been all cleaned up, dressed in a fresh t-shirt and jeans. Now he looked like he’d killed another man again, or at least had been in some kind of a fairly brutal fight.
Probably noticing my surprised and vaguely horrified reaction, he swallowed, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and I just blurted out exactly what I was thinking.