Last Girls

by Demetra Brodsky

  I head back out on the floor and sit at the counter, waiting for my order and marveling at my hands.

  “Why are you staring at your hands like you’re on magic mushrooms?” Brooke asks.

  “Stavros got all the paint off my skin with dish soap, cooking spray, and salt.”

  “Wonders never cease.”

  “Order up!” the cook yells.

  “Thanks.” As soon as I take the aluminum container from the pickup shelf, my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and read a text message from Bash.

  I’m in front of Tide Pool Coffee. Got you an Americano.

  I text, Be there in ten.

  “Eating or trading?” Brooke asks.

  “Trading. You have a ride?”

  “I have my car.”

  She knows I have a thing against people walking anywhere alone.

  I say, “Bye,” to Brooke and take a left out of Nikko’s and start walking the five blocks to The Chicken Coop.

  Bash is right where he said. Sipping coffee and stealing my fries, even though his deluxe gyro plate came with some of his own. We swap take-out containers before even saying hello and he hands me a much needed coffee. By ten o’clock at night, most people who work in restaurants are tired and too hungry to talk until they’ve had a few bites to eat.

  “What did you get me?”

  “The Mother Clucker.”

  “Perfect.” Best-named sandwich in San Diego.

  “I’ll never understand mayonnaise,” Bash says before taking another bite of his gyro. He proceeds to talk with his mouth full until he swallows the first bite. “I mean, it sounds disgusting in theory, right? Oil and egg yolks whipped together or whatever, but then—” He wiggles his fingers. “Magic.”

  “There’s no mayo on your sandwich.”

  “I know. I’m talking about what I got you.”

  “You want to switch halfway through, don’t you?”

  “Maybe. This is pretty freaking good, though. They put the luxe in deluxe over there.” He laughs without making a sound, mouth open wide, so I let him have his moment without explaining those words mean the same thing.

  “You want to come over and play Crack of Doom on Xbox?”

  “I can’t. I have something I need to do.”

  “All right, man. Next time.” Bash stands and stretches before walking his take-out container to the trash receptacle.

  For someone who likes to play survival games, he throws away a ton of recyclable aluminum. “I’m gonna give my fries to the homeless guy that hangs out on the corner outside the bank,” I tell him. “Where’s your car?”

  “Fir Street.”

  “Same.”

  When we get to the corner, the homeless man usually sitting on a plaid blanket at the corner of Fir and Kettner isn’t there. Aluminum foiled again. I toss my fries into the trash and slip the take-out container into the adjacent recycling bin. Bash and I say our goodbyes when we reach his ancient Honda. He’ll go home to his Xbox, and I’ll go back to my computer searches.

  I didn’t tell him about the little kids that came into the restaurant tonight. Bash stopped asking why I couldn’t hang out a long time ago. He knows.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, I’m jiggling my key in the lock. Jonesy opens the right side of our mustard-yellow double doors and nods his hello.

  “Any interesting customers come in tonight?”

  “Just a lady with four little kids. Three of them girls under ten. How about you? Catch any bad guys lately?”

  “Working on it.”

  Work fucking harder. I don’t say it, but it’s screaming in my head.

  Jonesy passes me on his way out with a pat on my shoulder. I know it’s meant as more paternal than patronizing, but the little kids in the restaurant got under my skin and it makes me bristle. “Leaving so soon?”

  He rubs one side of his salt-and-pepper beard with his index finger, gauging my level of sarcasm. “There’s work to be done, as you continue to point out.”

  As I will. Forever. “All right, man. See you next time.”

  I don’t hate Jonesy. I don’t even dislike him. He’s truly one of the good guys. But I have to blame someone other than myself, or I won’t make it to age nineteen.

  Mom is parked on the couch with our dog. When she hears me walk into the living room, she shuffles a bunch of loose papers and tucks them into her sketchbook.

  “Home an hour before curfew.” I can’t tell if that statement is applauding me for doing something right or hinting she knows I’ve been sneaking out.

  I’m the only legal adult I know with a midnight curfew. One of the prices I pay for living at home that has nothing to do with the overinflated rent situation in America’s Finest City. If you can afford it should be part of their slogan.

  With the exception of late-breaking stories, news at this time of night repeats the hits from the day. Unless an inflammatory tweet got sent by the current POTUS, from the White House, dressed in his bathrobe, leaving both sides scratching their heads. Visualize that weirdness with me and let it go. Mom rubs her hands over her face and makes her way to the television. Turning it off would be a first, considering she’s either watching the news or working on something, but tonight a human interest story catches her attention. She’s blocking my view, but I hear them announce the headline as I head to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  SHOTS FIRED AT A HIGH SCHOOL IN ELKWOOD, WASHINGTON, WERE DETERMINED TO BE AN ELABORATE PRANK.

  Mom kneels in front of the screen, watching closely as the camera pans the front lawn where teachers and students are clustered together. The reporter continues, saying authorities raced to the scene in anticipation of what would have been the twenty-fourth school shooting across the nation this year. I suppress a frustrated groan. I honestly can’t believe we don’t have stricter gun laws. We all know the NRA feeds political campaigns. It’s no secret that our country needs to get real about what matters. Namely, people’s lives. I’m glad I’m old enough to vote in the next election, because this guy has not so much brain as ear-wax. Hats off to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida for that gem.

  The story closes with them saying the student responsible is in deep sheet. More or less. I’m paraphrasing.

  Banquo comes into the kitchen when he hears me opening cabinets. He’s seventy-seven in people years now, so I let him eat as much people food as he wants. Mom doesn’t approve, but he’s been through everything with me, just like Bash. He’s earned it.

  “Hey, Banquo. You want a treat?”

  That offer gets his septuagenarian tail wagging. S-e-p-t-u-a-g-e-n-a-r-i-a-n. Banquo is a German shepherd-Lab mix, named for one of the Thanes in Macbeth. The one that should have been king. Mom follows him into the kitchen, and I hide my face behind a cabinet door, taking stock of what we have to eat. For some reason, the entire lower shelf is lined with boxes of macaroni and cheese that weren’t there yesterday.

  “You want me to make you something?” Mom asks.

  She’s behind me now, sifting through the cabinet over my shoulder. The smell of burning leaves wafts around me, which can only mean one thing. She’s smoking again.

  Most of the time she’s tranced-out working and I bring dinner home. When she pulls the occasional let-me-nurture-you thing, I recognize it as her attempt to make up for lost moments, a poultice against the punishing place her mind takes her when she’s working. Not that she was ever a doting parent. Make no mistake. Evie Ellis loves her kids, but she was always a career-driven artist. She left us with our neighbor, friends, anyone that could help, if needed. The sad reality is we both became victims of our selfishness.

  “Does it have to be one of the dozens of boxes of mac ’n’ cheese?” I throw her a bone, then grab a literal bone-shaped biscuit from the glass jar on the counter for Banquo.

  “They were on sale,” she says. “Five for a dollar. I thought it was a good idea to stockpile some food in case of emergency. That way we wouldn’t have to go out a
nd fight the people trying to shop. They’re meant to be kept as extras.”

  It rains ten inches a year in San Diego, so unless we’re about to get hit by a nuclear bomb, twenty boxes of anything seems excessive for two people. Three if you count Jonesy. But I shouldn’t joke. Not when the POTUS keeps insulting world leaders known to have weapons of mass destruction.

  I take a visual inventory of everything in the cabinets. Counting the obscene number of canned soup, beans, and pickles until I close the cabinet without choosing anything. She’s been stockpiling more and more.

  “I’m not actually hungry,” I tell her, “but thanks.”

  “How was work tonight?”

  I don’t know if she wants to make small talk or if she’s asking how much money I made.

  “Madness.” I dig into my pocket for the tips I made. Then I take thirty percent for myself and leave the rest on the counter. “How’d work go for you?”

  I lean against the sink and look into her haunted, oversized brown eyes. I still refer to her drawings and stuff as her work, because I don’t want to push her over the edge. Especially if she’s trying to work for real again.

  “I started a new painting that’s also madness,” she tells me, “‘yet there be method in it.’”

  That’s the first Shakespeare joke she’s made in a long time.

  “That’s great. I can’t wait to see it.” And honestly, it is great. A new piece could mean a comeback if she gets back into the swing of painting, but I know better than to get my hopes up.

  “Yeah,” she says with a shrug, inserting a long pause. “It’s just a start. We’ll see.”

  “Every great piece of art had to start with the first stroke. You told me that. Do you want to show it to me now?”

  “You want to see it?”

  “Of course. You’re Evie Ellis. Who wouldn’t want to see your new work?”

  “Okay,” she says. “Yeah.”

  I follow her and she hesitates before letting me inside her private realm.

  Her easel is set up with a big canvas. It’s just a sketch covered by a thin underpainting. Three teenage girls that might be a nod to the Weird Sisters from Macbeth, but only the one in the center has her features drawn.

  “She kind of looks like … me. And you, of course, but younger.”

  “And infinitely wiser, I’m sure,” Mom says. “I can’t seem to get her out of my head lately.”

  Today must have been a good-memory day.

  That’s also a good thing. Because after the girls vanished, she kind of disappeared. Maybe she’s finally ready to paint herself back into the picture.

  CQB

  CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE

  I TOLD MY sisters to head straight to our room when we got home so we could regroup and avoid a close quarters battle, but Birdie isn’t having it. She’s soaked to the bone, waiting for our mother to get here. I can tell she’s ready to get into it by the way she stands taller, arms crossed, despite the pleading look I’m giving her to not start something she can’t finish.

  “What did Dieter mean when he said you were the leader of The Nest?” she asks, before Mother even has a chance to remove her black rain boots.

  “It means she’s the lady boss of all the women,” Blue answers from the couch. She’s already stripped out of her wet clothes and picked up her latest needlepoint project. She just keeps her needle going up and down through the fabric without looking at Birdie. I lean closer to see what she’s stitching into a shirt, and it says Only The Strong Survive. I envy Blue’s ability to state facts, but I think we all knew what Dieter meant at face value.

  That’s not what Birdie’s asking, though, and Mother knows it, because she fills a kettle with water for tea instead of validating Blue’s answer. She floats lemon balm, motherwort, peppermint, and ginger on the water and places it on the burner. Picking carefully chosen herbs known to induce a calm state while tempering her answer. Have you ever noticed when you’re waiting answers, and the other person stalls, how normal sounds become amplified? I swear, the temporary click-whoosh-hah of the blue flame racing around the burner is louder than an ocean wave receding.

  “What it means,” Mother says finally, “is any decisions pertaining to The Nest will be discussed between me and Dieter Ackerman, making it easier for him to focus on the workings of The Burrow. I’ll be performing the same duties with the addition of overseeing tasks decided upon for everyone in The Nest.”

  “Like a partnership?” Birdie asks.

  “In a word.”

  “So, more than a partnership,” Birdie prods. “If it’s in a word, what are the other words? Can we get a whole sentence about what your new partnership will mean for us and the rest of the coalition?”

  I lean against a wall next and pick underneath my fingernails, where moss-green acrylic paint has made its stubborn home over the last week. I’m waiting for the boom, thanks to Birdie who keeps pushing Mother’s buttons. Sure enough, Mother turns away from the stove quicker than usual, her dying patience drawing her mouth into a flat line. But it’s the way she lowers the spoon exaggeratedly slow, stopping herself from slamming it down, that gives me pause.

  “What exactly are you asking, Birdie? If we’re on the subject of words, perhaps you could use yours? I caught the exchange between you and Daniel. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about that?”

  I decide to interject before Birdie shoots her mouth off about Daniel and starts singing like a songbird about her own involvement. “I think what Birdie means is—”

  “I didn’t ask you, Honey. I asked your sister.”

  I hold up my hands in surrender. Fair enough. I was just trying to divert attention back to what it means for us, my own ranking, hoping to stem the flow of whatever is bound to fly from Birdie’s mouth.

  “So you’re just going to do whatever Dieter wants like you’re his—”

  Don’t say it, Birdie. Don’t say it, Birdie. Don’t say it, Birdie.

  The galled look on Mother’s face is enough to stop my sister from blurting what her tone implied.

  “She’s his second-in-command,” I offer. But inside I’m shrinking back, knowing I said something similar to Birdie in the locker room about doing whatever Daniel says.

  “I understood,” Birdie says. “But why not assign that duty to Magda?”

  “You heard him,” Mother says with a shrug. “To avoid nepotism. He doesn’t want our way of life to be perceived as an inequitable, Ackerman-run compound. He needed someone to act as second-in-command. Someone in The Nest.”

  “But it is Ackerman-run,” I say. “Or it was when we got here, so why the change?”

  “Whenever anyone joins or leaves this coalition, The Nest and The Burrow are changed, and hopefully evolve. Such as when we were welcomed because of my nursing background. Duties were shifted. Magda is excellent at gardening and making tinctures with herbs. No one can deny that. But she isn’t a trained nurse practitioner with a special interest in pharmacology.”

  My own feelings about this topic rise to the surface against my better judgement. The tension between the families is rising fast. “But she is his wife,” I say. “And the other Nesters will think—”

  “I know very well what they already think,” Mother snaps. “Just because I understand Dieter’s larger vision for this compound does not mean I jumped into bed with him the first chance I got.”

  “Fine. If you say it’s not true then I believe you.”

  “I should hope so,” Mother says. “If I don’t have the trust of my own daughters, then I’ve done something very wrong in raising you.”

  Birdie stares at me without comment. That doesn’t mean I don’t know what she’s thinking. We all get the same verge-of-an-eye-roll look whenever Mother makes statements steeped in as much guilt as the nurturing tea she’s pouring into mugs.

  I heard what Mother said. I’m just not as quick to believe it. Especially since her defense was that she didn’t jump into bed with him the first chance she
got. We’ve been here for a year. That’s a lot of chances. I am glad Birdie stopped pouring gas on the inflammatory situation, though. Last time she entered a crossfire with Mother, it was over Birdie’s annoyance with the way the genders are divided into separate garrisons. The blowback resulted in us cleaning our assigned bunker and rotating supplies. We still had to spend a couple of hours rushing through our homework when we were done. H-o-m-e-w-o-r-k. Half-of-my-energy-wasted-on-random-knowledge. It was two a.m. before we crawled into our beds.

  Mother snaps at Birdie the most, to be honest, because she’s annoyed my middle sister doesn’t love her the way she craves, with unwavering attachment and unflinching allegiance. We’re more loyal to each other than anyone else, and I think it’s slowly driving Mother mad. Maybe it was different when we were little and needed her more. I don’t remember. But ever since we came to The Nest, Mother has followed Dieter Ackerman’s dictate like a loyal dog, no matter what it means for my sisters and me. That’s how I knew Birdie was on the verge of saying like his bitch, because she’s said it before in private. Out of the three of us, Birdie is a perfect example of why we need rules. I enforce them. Blue acts like they don’t apply to her. But Birdie will flat-out disregard them if she’s got an agenda. A lovestruck liar’s agenda.

  I say, “I have to hit the books,” the same time Mother says, “It’s getting late.”

  The circles blooming beneath her eyes are undoubtedly from fretting over our whereabouts earlier. We need to get our cellphone back before she tries to call us again.

  “Finish your tea so you can head upstairs and try to get some sleep,” Mother says.

  Fine by me. I’ve been trying to get my sisters into our shared bedroom since we got home. Our house is a rustic two-story bungalow with wide-plank wooden walls and three bedrooms, built specifically for life in The Nest. There are three rooms on the second floor that we have to ourselves. Mother uses one of the downstairs rooms for her bedroom, a tiny room made for storage that barely fits more than her bed and a small dresser. She claims she likes sleeping close to the front door and keeps a loaded gun behind a painting on the wall next to her bed. For safety and quick access. I was under the impression living here, in and of itself, was about safety. That’s the way she sold it to us. But Mother says you can never be too safe.