So much bull, p.1
So Much Bull, page 1
part #1 of Penny Post Myth Agent Series
SO MUCH BULL
A PENNY POST MYTH AGENT NOVEL
ALEX A. KING
Copyright © 2021 by Alex A. King
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Also by Alex A. King
Glossary
Author’s Note
CHAPTER 1
When I was twenty-three, six months after he had vanished without so much as a “Bye, cupcake,” Luke Remis swaggered back into my life with a brand new tattoo of a snake mid-slither across his liver and a killer golden tan.
Up until two years ago, Luke was rock solid. You could tether yourself to him in any storm and make it through okay. Everyone in our tight-knit Greek community in Salem, Oregon thought rainbows shone out of Luke’s ass. To mothers and grandmothers, he was the hottest commodity around. He paid his rent on time, had a good job—doing what, exactly, nobody knew—and he attended church every Sunday with his terrifying grandmother. He was everything a Good Greek Boy should be, and we were in love, on and off.
Because our mothers were friends and our grandmothers were frenemies, and despite him being two years older than me, we grew up galloping through each other’s homes and yards. Luke had my back all the way through elementary school. Messing with me was like begging to spend one-on-one time with his fist. To be honest, Luke Remis was a better big brother than my flesh and snot sibling, John.
Everything changed when puberty roared into my life. Boobs and BO seized the wheel and slammed the gas pedal, spinning me out of Toys “R” Us and into the cosmetics aisle at Dollar Tree. Overnight, my best friend Lena and I started obsessing about things like makeup, and squeezing pimples, and boys. At the same time, Luke put me on his ignore list. Rumor had it girls were lining up for whatever it was he was handing out. His penis and his charm, Lena decided.
“He hates me,” I said. “We were friends and now he totally hates me. Is it the zits? Be honest.”
“More like the tits,” Lena said like she knew. “Ten bucks says he wants to see them.”
Panic and a disturbing amount of excitement coursed through me. “Well, he can’t see them!”
“You have to show them to somebody sooner or later. Why not Luke Remis?”
Because I couldn’t find a flaw in her twelve-year-old logic, I cornered Luke behind Saint John the Baptist, the local Greek Orthodox church, on Easter Saturday, minutes before midnight. His mother was in a foul mood because he had refused to wear a suit, insisting on his new go-to outfit, jeans and a leather jacket. (Luke won that battle, but only because his mom didn’t want to be late for the service. The war would recommence later, when she was sure she could crush him under her sensible heel.)
Luke’s gaze slid away from me, as if the flouncy, childish blouse and skirt Mom twisted my arm into wearing burned his eyeballs.
“S’up?”
“This.” Feeling bold and ridiculous, I’d unbuttoned my blouse and popped the fastener on my only bra that opened at the front: a sports bra that flattened my new breasts to pancakes.
Luke … stared.
Five endless seconds later, his survival instincts kicked in. “Jesus Christ, Penny!” He shrugged out of his leather jacket and threw it over my head.
My shame and I went to find Lena. “He definitely likes you,” she said. “Do you seriously think he would cover up any other girl?”
“Yes?”
“No! And you know why? Because he doesn’t respect other girls.”
“Isn’t that bad?”
She shrugged, one-shouldered. “For them.”
The day I turned eighteen, Luke Remis rang my doorbell. Over the past six years he’d gained a whole lot of muscle and enough height—6’1” in his final form—to wear it dangerously. He leaned against the porch railing looking like same-old Luke Remis with a brand new streak of bad.
“Can I get a do-over?”
That night at the church came flooding back. The embarrassment. Lena’s assurances that he respected me more than every other girl.
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Luke got his do-over, my virginity, and access to my mom’s cookie jar. Our families started eyeballing china designs when they thought we weren’t looking.
After he flew to Greece to perform his mandatory national service—a must for all Greek men who lived in or out of the homeland—the Luke Remis who returned was flakier than the average box of cereal.
We fought and bonked and fought.
Then he vanished.
And now here was Luke again, his mouth overflowing with what I was positive was bullshit.
“I can explain,” he said.
“This better be good—and true.”
“I was chained to a rock. There were birds. Well, one big bird. It ate my liver.”
“For six months?”
“I know how it sounds …”
“Like bullshit?”
“Penny …”
“You were chained to a rock for six months, and there was a bird? And now suddenly there’s no rock, no bird, and you’ve got a spectacular tan? You should get checked for skin cancer, by the way.”
He hoisted up his shirt, revealing a tattoo of a snake, coiled around his six-pack. “And this.”
“And a tattoo?”
He opened his mouth. Before he could speak, I thrust my hand in front of his face. The world’s tiniest diamond winked in the sunlight.
“Zip it, Remis. I’m getting married.”
The very last time I saw Luke Remis was on my wedding day. He hobbled out of the room, smothered in cake, in dire need of an icepack.
It was my big day, but he got the better deal.
Five years later …
All summer long, Betty Sue Bentley swept into Salome’s Salon bi-weekly for the blowouts she’d wear to fundraising lunches and other assorted events for the high maintenance set with deep, dubious pockets. Every time it was the same thing: wash, blow dry, style into a helmet that could stand up to blowhards and other Oregonians.
Summers—and Betty Sue Bentleys—in Oregon were unforgiving. They weren’t the summers I remembered from my childhood. The dry season used to be a gentle thing. Now every year it was a raging, hormonal she-dog, until around mid-September when the switch flipped and the weather wept and howled until April became May.
I had ten minutes left until lunch—ten minutes of Betty Sue nattering about the most effective methods of squeezing money out of donors—then, I’d get to drive the two blocks to where my mother would be hauling lunch out of the oven. (My family doesn’t do light lunches. Given that one whole half is Greek—Mom’s side—we go all in and get the main meal of the day under our belts before the afternoon heat sucks the life out of our bodies. Of course, the rest of my family gets to sleep. )
I wasn’t qualified to cut, but I was a wizard with a styling brush and hot air. My own hair had persuaded many a client to take a chance on my skills. Thanks to my Greek heritage, my thick, dark hair skimmed the bottom of my shoulder blades and gripped a curl or wave like it would die if it let go. Salome’s Salon was my longest lasting job. I’d been gainfully here a whopping six months, since my divorce was finalized and I could finally afford to knock three jobs down to one.
Betty Sue was wriggling in her seat.
“Hold still,” I told her.
“I’m gonna lose my shit if I don’t get a cigarette soon,” she muttered. She reached for her bag—expensive and definitely not a knock-off—and hoisted the whole thing onto her lap.
“No—no cigarettes in here.”
“The whole fucking world has lost its mind over this whole ‘no smoking thing.’ I remember when you could light up in a hospital room. Nobody cared. Nobody died.”
I was pretty sure that wasn’t true. The way I heard it, smoking around oxygen was a big no-no, even in the old days. How many people had exploded before someone figured out the correlation, that’s what I wanted to know.
“Well, you can’t smoke in here. Salome has a sign.” I pointed to the sign with my styling brush.
Betty Sue laughed. Her hand was busy in her bag. Hunting for her purse, hopefully. “What are you going to do? Throw me out?”
I set down the brush and reached for the spray. Extra-heavy hold. Betty Sue didn’t want her hair to budge while she was writing checks and slamming wine spritzers.
“My arms are way too noodley for throwing people.”
Several things happened in the same moment. Individually they were benign. Together, they spelled catastrophe.
My client brushed off my warning and pointing. In my haste to get her out of here so she could get
My instincts screeched, “RUN.”
I didn’t listen.
Instead of hauling ass out of the hair salon, I threw a towel over Betty Sue’s head and shoved her toward the basins.
“AHHHHH,” she screamed.
She dropped her cigarette, now lit thanks to her flaming hair.
Things that happened next, in somewhat chronological order:
The salon went WHOMPH.
Everyone managed to get out. Some carrying their favorite scissors and styling tools.
An ambulance arrived with the fire department. They wheeled Bettie Sue away. She didn’t tip me; probably because I didn’t warn her hard enough not to light a cigarette.
Salome—not her real name, which was a less exotic but more glamorous Marilyn—barked at me to go home. Something told me I was on the verge of losing the most stable job I’d had in years.
“But—”
“Go,” she barked.
“If you’ll just—”
“Which part of ‘go’ didn’t you understand?”
“The g and the o, mostly. At least not in that order. I’m sorry—” I started to say, but she turned her back on me and stalked over to the firefighters. I heard her demand to speak to their manager. The fire wasn’t dying fast enough for her liking. Which I totally got. Nobody likes a fast-moving fire. But what did she expect when the air and surfaces in her salon were smothered in flammables?
I waved at her back, told her to call me later, and crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t have to look for a new job. I’d already done all the minimum wage jobs that required clothes.
The only things left were poles and street corners, and I didn’t have the underwear for those.
I pulled into the driveway in front of my parents’ house, a triple-level threat to good taste. In a sedate neighborhood of craftsman and ranch homes, my parents had built a tribute to my mom’s cultural heritage. The stone and stucco house was white with random columns holding up the gables. Two lions—more stone—glared at anyone trotting along the sidewalk. Mom had wanted to dig up the lawn and concrete the whole thing, but Dad put his foot down. Like most neighborhoods, theirs could only handle change in small doses. An absence of lawn would freak out the neighbors.
My family was assembled on the driveway, using their hands as visors. “Would you look at that,” my mother said to nobody in particular.
A discerning person—anyone with semi-functioning eyes, or better—would instantly notice I was a Frankenstein’s monster made up of my family’s DNA. Mom, a Greek expat since childhood, was all hips and boobs and butt. She passed down the hips and butt, and kept the boobs, fiery temper and platinum blond hair—probably because the last one came out of a bottle. We were the same height—5’3”—which was only a problem at the supermarket. At 28, I was sure my growing upwards days were over. Dad, who hovered around 6’, hadn’t donated any of his height to my physical makeup, but he had contributed my cheekbones and my skin’s ability to burn. Sometimes I questioned whether we were part vampire. One ray of natural sunlight and my skin would throw up its metaphorical hands and yell, “Take me, I’m yours!” My brother, who wasn’t on the driveway, had Dad’s build and Mom’s face.
“Somebody made fire,” my grandmother said. Yiayia (Greek for grandmother) was my mother’s mother, a tiny raisin of a woman with skinny legs and a pot belly. A lifetime of shunning good foundation undergarments meant everything swung to and fro. Probably she could tie her boobs in a neat decorative bow and throw them over one shoulder—or both, simultaneously. She was the reason I invested heavily in good bras, no matter how hard my bank account cried
“Somebody made fire,” Grandpa said in a mocking voice. “Ain’t nobody around here says somebody made fire. Fire is a thing you set. You ever gonna learn English?”
Grandpa is Dad’s Dad. He loves beer and guns, and guns and beer, and his favorite color is mossy oak camouflage. Physically he’s a bigger version of Yiayia—minus the dangling bosoms—but nobody mentions the resemblance because they’re afraid he’ll cut them out when he makes homemade jerky. Grandpa moved into my parents’ converted garage after Grandma (Dad’s mother) was crushed in a Black Friday sale at 7-Eleven. She’d really wanted those half-price air fresheners, and so had everyone else. The move was supposed to be temporary, but after fifteen years I figured he wasn’t going anywhere.
Yiayia stabbed his face with a look sharp enough to shatter rock. “That how we say it in Greece.”
“Would you look at that,” Mom repeated. This time she was talking to me. “Christos and the Virgin Mary! I hope it doesn’t spread here. Maybe I should pack a bag.”
“I don’t need to look at it.” I slouched past them. “It’s my fire. I did it. Sort of.”
Mom followed me into the house. “You’re an arsonist? Po-po-po, my own daughter. What am I going to tell people at church?”
“It was an accident! A stupid hair accident. Betty Sue Bentley will be fine, and they even think her hair might grow back. In my defense, it wasn’t my fault she lit up while I was spraying her hair. I warned her—twice! It says on the can that hairspray is highly flammable. Who doesn’t make it to adulthood without knowing that? It’s like how everyone knows not to shower with the toaster!”
The Post family home is as Greek on the inside as it is on the outside. Lots of froufrou. Frilly curtains. An overabundance of doilies. Pictures of Jesus and his family and friends tacked to walls all over the house. Like all Good Greek Women, Mom has a room reserved solely for special guests. In there, the furniture wears plastic and the table is covered in photographs of her beloved family. Every embarrassing pre-cell phone picture that exists of me can be found in that room. When I can, I sneak in and hide myself behind the family wedding photos. Because she misses nothing, Mom always moves me back to where I can be silently mocked by her guests.
Without stopping to sit my bag on the foyer table, I headed toward the kitchen, the one place I could reliably get a temporary sugar fix for my anxiety. Today, the kitchen was bare. Not a single baked good under the cake stand’s dome. The plastic containers that always held Greek sweets were empty. Even Dad’s cookie jar, the one that contained his store-bought American cookies was empty. What madness was this?
“No cake?”
“I threw it to the birds,” Mom said.
“You threw the cake to the birds?”
“I’m trying to watch my figure,” Mom said. “Your grandmother said I was getting big enough to mount on a spit.”
“Grandma has a hump and brittle bones from starving when the generals did their coup in Greece fifty years ago. Don’t take advice from her!” I slumped down at the kitchen table. “Today sucks. Fire. No cake. What’s next?”
Mom snatched up her wooden spoon and gave the spaghetti sauce a poke. “Think positive. You dwell on the bad, the bad bring friends.”
My cellphone rang. Hopefully not work calling to fire me.
Ah, crap. Caller ID flashed a picture of a poop emoji. Chaz, my ex-husband.
“What, Chaz?” I said with utter resignation. “What now?”
His high-pitched voice had teeth in it. “Your child support check is late again.”
My butt clenched. My gut spasmed. We didn’t have a child. What we shared was custody of our cat. Prince Charleston—Chunky for short—was mine on weekends, when Chaz would allow it. Prince Charleston’s horrendous moniker was my former mother-in-law’s fault. She’d named our cat for us, claiming Chaz was her little prince and she wanted to give his cat the same name.
“You’ll get your money.”
