Smart Mouth Waitress (30 page)

“Learn to apologize.”

He ruffled his hair with one hand, looking sheepish. “I'm sorry I said that stuff. I miss Mom.”

“I miss her too,” I said. “But while she's gone, I'm going to do some things, like finally paint this room.”

His eyes got wide. “Can I paint my room too?” he asked.

If one painted room would annoy my mother, two would push her to madness. I nodded. “Yes, you can. You have my permission.”

He jumped up and down. Honestly, you've never seen a boy so excited about interior decoration. “I'm going to paint it black,” he said.

“As well you should. But you have to help me with my room tonight, and we'll do yours tomorrow.”

He picked up a brush. “Mom would never let us do this.”

“I know. That's what makes it so fun.”

He immediately slopped a big droplet of paint on the hardwood. “Oops,” he said.

“You're a big boy. Go get some paper towel and clean it up.”

He pointed at me. “Bro! Right! I'll do that.”

My father got back from his drive and stopped in to see what we were doing. I expected him to turn away in disgust, ignoring the problem, or possibly overreact with a little screaming. What I didn't expect was support.

“I never liked the pink,” he said.

We didn't ask my father for permission to paint Garnet's room, because I figured it was better to beg for forgiveness and have a cool room in the color you love than ask and get turned down.

Sometimes it's better to take what you want.

The next day, after work I went by the paint store near our house and paid for Garnet's paint out of my own account. The man at the counter kept repeating to me that the charcoal color was meant only for trim or accents, and not an entire room.

“My brother is fifteen,” I said. “Can you imagine how cool this is going to make him with his friends?”

The man shook his head and loaded the paint into the shaker.

The idea of the paint had cheered Garnet right up. None of us had discussed the bad news about my mother staying away an additional month.

Putting a smile on my brother's face was a great use of forty dollars. Plus, it would really piss off my mother. All for forty bucks.

Wednesday night we finished painting my room and started painting Garnet's, doing just the edging. On Thursday night we did three full coats of nearly-black charcoal on his walls.

One unexpected bonus of the project was we discovered the source of the smell in Garnet's room.

It wasn't so much one source as two: a pile of liquid that may have been a banana, plus a furry thing in the closet that may have been a living furry thing, or a sandwich. Whatever the furry thing was, we scooped it up with a dustbin and didn't check for bones.

When our work was done, Garnet's black bedroom was a thing of striking beauty. Our house has thick, white molding and window trim, plus extra-deep crown molding where the wall meets the ceiling. We left the trim and Garnet's ceiling white—a specific Benjamin Moore shade of white that Mom paid a designer to pick out—so his room didn't look so much like the blackness of outer space as it did a smart-looking tuxedo. After we put his framed sports jerseys back on the wall, covering the biggest expanses of black, the wall color didn't seem that unusual, to my disappointment.

I said, “It looks so awesome, I wonder if Mom will have a hard time hating this.”

“No, she's going to freak,” he said reassuringly.

Even though we were done painting, I had gotten comfortable hanging out in Garnet's room, and I lingered there, looking at his paperback books while he used his laptop, sitting on his bed cross-legged and propping the laptop up with a beanbag-like laptop pillow my parents originally bought for me to use. Several of the paperbacks on his shelf had originally been mine as well.

“It's been fun hanging out with you,” I said.

“Kyle wanted to help me paint, but I haven't told him yet that the you-know-what is gone.”

“Do you think he would have wanted to smoke them tonight?”

Garnet shrugged. In my head, I heard one of those TV-special messages for parents.
Talk to your kids about drugs!

I get it
, I said back to the voice.
I'am talking to my kid about drugs, even though he's not my kid.
We'd also had our little heart-to-heart about sex not even a week earlier. I was pretty much the best parent ever, considering I was only three years older than the little sweat gland.

“
How many times did you guys smoke up?” I asked as I casually pulled out one of his Harry Potter books. I wondered if the book was the one we all stood in line outside the book store for, to buy at midnight. Dad had taken us, and he'd had the night of his life, hanging out with all the other Dads his age, enjoying the costumes and fun.

How quickly we had gone from lining up for books to talking about drugs.

“Just once, but it didn't do anything,” Garnet said.

“Promise me something,” I said, remembering my session with the eyebrow piercer, when she'd made me promise not to go under a piercing gun again. “Promise you won't smoke up again until after you're eighteen, when your brain isn't developing. When I was your age, one of the boys at school went psychotic because of pot.”

Garnet blew air out of his mouth noisily. “Yeah right.”

“
I'm not lying. They'll never know if he was going
to develop
schizophrenia on his own, but the marijuana sure didn't help,” I said.

Garnet closed his laptop and stared at me silently. “Is Uncle Jeff schizophrenic?”

“We're not sure what he is,” I said. “Hey, don't look so sad. You can drink all the beer you can get your hands on, and I won't say a word. Just stay away from the hard stuff.”

“Okay,” he said.

A pleasant feeling came over me.

I was so proud of my conversation with my brother, I almost wished my mother had been there to see it. She would also
hate
the charcoal-black walls. That made me smile.

My brain shivered with the little I'm-forgetting-something feeling I get when I haven't checked for text messages in several hours, so I pulled out my phone.

“That's odd,” I said.

Garnet didn't look up from his computer.

I sat down next to him on his bed. I had a friend request from the last person I'd expected to friend me. Actually, the request wasn't Courtney's girlfriend Britain, so I guess that would make it the second-to-last person.

Sunshine Cooper had sent me a friend request. Bubbling with curiosity, I accepted, and ran to my room to look at all her photos on my laptop.

As I was enlarging some pictures of her, looking for evidence of any flaws in her creamy skin, I got an instant message from her.

Sunshine:
How do I know you?

Me:
You're the one who requested me.

Sunshine:
I know. You looked familiar and Facebook suggested. Who are you?

Who was I? Besides the girl who liked her ex-boyfriend and also her brother?

Me:
I'm the smart mouth waitress from The Whistle.

She disappeared, logging off. Anticipating a rapid un-friending, I quickly right-clicked on a bunch of her photos, saving them to my desktop for future analysis. Before she had dyed her hair blue, pierced her eyebrow, and got the cute swirly tattoo on the one eyebrow, she'd looked like a regular girl you'd know from school. She looked like a Chloe or a Jenny.

Her profile showed she was going to beauty school, and planning to work in TV and film. “Lucky you,” I said to my laptop screen, even though I knew I could go to beauty school if I wanted.

I had liked the idea of that type of work, until we had career day at school and I attended a session with a working hair stylist. The woman had talked for several minutes about her neck, back, and foot pain. She then moved on to even less inspiring topics, such as inhaling toxic hair-straightening chemicals.

That particular career fair, all the people I picked seemed depressed and miserable at their jobs. I guess you'd have to be unhappy, to leave your work to go to a high school and talk about your career.

I wished people would have been more up-front about the salary. If they do tell you, it's the annual wage, and you have to divide it a couple times to figure out what the pay is per hour. If I were setting up a career day, I'd put the hourly wages next to the name of the career, right there on the sign-up sheet. Wouldn't that be useful?

On my screen, Sunshine hadn't reappeared. I was ready to go to bed, early so I wouldn't sleep in Friday and waste my day off by being unconscious through it, but my stomach was doing flip-flops over the idea of Sunshine logging back in to talk to me. How could I sleep?

I even had a little story concocted about what she might have been doing!

Maybe she wanted to get Marc back for herself, so she wanted me out of the picture, with her super-hot brother.

You know how you like an idea so much you convince yourself it must be true? That was how I felt that night about the whole Marc and Cooper situation.

I was, of course, completely wrong about everything, but I had no idea that night as I crawled into bed, my laptop next to me so I could check it if I woke up in the night.