The extra series 1, p.29
The Extra Series, #1, page 29
The girl bounces up to me. “I’m Ginnie. And this is my brother Byron. We’ve seen you on your show. Mom says you’re famous.”
Ginnie and Byron. Right. Tanya’s kids. Honestly, I had kind of forgotten about them, which seems horrible, given that they’ll eventually be my stepsiblings. But I’ve learned over the years that stepsiblings, like stepmoms, have a tendency of coming and going pretty quickly.
Still, the girl clearly knows how to get on my good side. I smile at her, even as I’m scraping the poop off onto the grass. “I don’t know about famous, but thanks,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you. So did my dad start letting the neighbors park their cows on our driveway?” I gesture to the giant shit patty.
Ginnie giggles again. “No, that’s from our dog, Buckley. He’s staying here with us, too.”
Of course he is. And from the green, grassy quality of this shit, there must be something seriously wrong with that dog.
“I play football,” Byron blurts out, mostly to my chest.
I don’t know what to say to that, but suddenly I’m wishing I were wearing a less tight t-shirt.
“Ginnie! Byron!” a woman’s voice calls, sparing me from further conversation about dog poop and being ogled by my teenage future stepbrother. “Your mom says you should come inside and eat, before the food gets—Anna-Marie! You’ve made it!”
My aunt Patrice jogs down the porch steps in her usual outdated pant-suit, her dyed-brown hair in the stiff bouffant she’s had ever since I’ve been alive. She thinks it makes her look like Liz Taylor, but really it just looks like she needs a new stylist who isn’t a hundred years old. Patrice’s arms are stretched wide for a hug, even though she’s still several yards away. I meet her halfway and am enveloped in the scent of grilled burgers and some epically strong perfume that I can only imagine is named “Lilacs and Even More Lilacs: In Case You Missed It the First Time.”
Slightly dizzying, but I imagine it’s better than what I smell like after two days in the car and with dog crap on my shoes.
Patrice squeezes me hard enough I grunt, and then pulls back. “So good to see our little star! Such a shame you were trapped in the limelight for Aunt Ida’s funeral.”
She gives me a look that tells me she suspects that this was entirely my choice, which, to be fair, it was. As she continues, I find that’s not a decision I regret.
“We talk about you all the time, you know. Your hair has some red in it now! That’s for your show, I assume? Lily says it looks like they feed you well on set, but you’re still slim as a reed! Guess the camera really does add ten pounds.”
I’m sure my smile is more of a grimace, but Patrice doesn’t seem to notice. She’s right about the red tint to my normally medium-brown hair, at least—my on-set stylist keeps it dyed for my character. But I really could have done without the signature Aunt Patrice backhanded compliment.
The world in general could do without those, but it’s never going to stop Patrice.
She’s got her arm linked tightly in mine, guiding me up the stairs like I’m a blind flight risk. “Speaking of weight,” she says, “did you hear that Sheila over at the bakery had the gastric bypass? I told her she looks like a new woman, you know, and she does. A much smaller woman. I think she’s got a real chance of landing a husband now, especially since she’s started taping down all those skin flaps . . .”
There’s more, but my brain remembers its atrophying defense mechanism of Tuning Out Patrice, or simply TOP, as my dad and I call it.
I enter the house, and there’s Patrice’s daughter, my cousin Lily, sitting at the kitchen table filing her nails while her father, my uncle Joe, can be seen outside through the screen door swearing at the grill. They live a whopping twenty minutes out of town where Joe manages a cattle ranch, but as per reunion tradition, we all pile into Dad’s house anyway, him being the one with a residence “in town.”
Lily looks me up and down when I enter and narrows her eyes, but doesn’t bother getting up. “Anna-Marie,” she says, as if my arrival is the most tedious part of her glamour-filled life.
“Lily,” I respond in kind.
We’ve never been friends, and that’s clearly not about to start now. She’s been jealous of me since we were in fourth grade and the boy she liked, Jimmy Sears, asked me if I would kiss him at recess. Which I did, and was put off enough by the whole experience that I didn’t kiss a boy again until freshman year of high school. (And soon thereafter learned that Jimmy Sears wasn’t representative of the kissing experience as a whole).
But with that gross kiss that involved a surprising amount of tongue and tasted like onion rings, the gauntlet had apparently been thrown down. Lily made it her goal to kiss every boy in school that liked me, or that I had a crush on. It started going further than kissing at some point in high school, and though I’m hardly one to judge anyone for an active sex life, it’s not a reach to say that Lily’s vagina became one of Everett’s most-visited attractions.
None of which would have actually bothered me all that much if she hadn’t tried so blatantly to sleep with Shane. She never succeeded—as far as I know—but I could only endure my cousin having wardrobe malfunctions in front of my first (and only) serious boyfriend so many times before I broke into her house one night and shaved her eyebrows off while she was sleeping.
I’d like to say I wasn’t proud of my actions, that I regretted it the next morning when she came to school with brown marker lines drawn above her eyes. But that would be a lie.
Lily’s eyebrows have long since grown back, and hopefully both of us are past that sort of thing. But judging by the glare she gives me, I’m definitely locking the door to my room while I sleep.
“Pumpkin!” my dad’s booming voice rings out from down the hall, and soon he’s there, hugging me. Dad’s got the same blue eyes I have and hair the same chestnut brown as my natural color—though his is graying at the edges and thinning at the top. He’s a handsome man for his age, though he’s gotten a bit thicker around the middle since I last saw him. Or maybe it’s just that the v-neck shirt he’s wearing is a size too small, and dear god, are those—?
“Skinny jeans,” my dad says, seeing my horrified gaze at his legs. He doesn’t appear nearly as abashed as a man his age should be for wearing those things, no matter how good looking he is. Especially tucked as they are into cowboy boots. “Tanya likes the way they make my ass look. And what Tanya likes . . .” He trails off with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows.
I heroically hold in a gag.
“Bill, I was just telling Anna-Marie about Sheila’s gastric bypass,” Patrice says, sweeping by us with a thick cloud of lilac scent. “You should tell her how good Sheila looks now. Oh! And tell her about the nice Muslim family that moved down the street! They are the sweetest people, and . . . wait. Maybe they’re Indian. Well, sweet all the same, and—Dad!” she calls down to the basement, to where my Grandpa is likely sleeping in his favorite chair in front of the TV. “Dad! Anna-Marie is here and dinner is ready and . . . is that dog sleeping on the couch?” Her voice trails off as she heads downstairs, and Dad grins at me.
“Activating TOP systems?” he asks.
“TOP systems are go,” I say, smiling back.
“So have you met Ginnie and Byron yet?” He looks over my shoulder. I turn to see the two of them in the front doorway, Ginnie beaming at me and Byron with his hands shoved in his jeans pockets and staring at the floor.
“Yes, just outside.” I try to think of anything I can say to make it seem like I actually invested energy in getting to know them. “Ginnie has really fabulous taste in shoes”—the girl’s smile stretches even wider, and she shifts in her sparkly ballet flats so that the sunlight catches the sequins—“and Byron plays football.”
My dad raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
Byron’s face flushes crimson. “I mean, I have played football,” he mumbles. “With friends.”
Dad nods. “Well, Byron, why don’t you get Anna-Marie’s suitcase from the car and bring it in for her.”
Byron runs back outside like he’s fleeing a crime scene. I realize that I never shut the door to my car, let alone locked it, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. This is Everett, not Los Angeles. I could leave the car totally open and running all week and the worst I’d have to fear would be a dead battery and some raccoons nesting in the front seat.
“And while he’s doing that,” Dad continues, “I’ll go find Tanya so you ladies can finally meet.”
“Don’t bother, I’m here,” a voice calls from upstairs, and a woman quickly bounds down the steps. “Anna-Marie,” she says, when she’s nearing the bottom, “I’m so excited to finally meet you.”
I try to say the same, but I’m having trouble forming words that aren’t “Oh my god, are you younger than me?” So I just smile like an idiot in return.
Tanya is really pretty, with the same honey-blonde hair as her kids, cut in a face-framing bob. She’s wearing frayed jean shorts and a t-shirt that says “A woman’s place is in the House and the Senate,” and feather earrings that dangle down to brush her shoulders.
I know Dad said she’s a bookkeeper from Evanston but she looks like she could be a co-ed at the University of Wyoming. I know she can’t actually be as young as she looks, given that she has a teenage son. But it’s super disconcerting.
“Tanya loves your show,” my dad says. “She didn’t watch many soaps before, but you should hear her go on about who Maeve should end up with.”
“That’s great,” I manage. Tanya’s lips twist to the side in a knowing smile.
“They have awards for soap operas, don’t they?” Dad asks. “I imagine you’ll be getting one of those soon.”
The thought of me getting a Daytime Emmy—something Bridget Messler herself has yet to achieve—is crazy laughable. Which isn’t to say I haven’t, on occasion, practiced my acceptance speech in the bathroom, holding a bottle of conditioner like it’s the golden statue.
But I can’t exactly tell my dad how unlikely the possibility is. He’d never believe me, anyway.
“Maybe,” I say.
There is an awkward pause, which I know I should fill, but I’m still trying to do the math on Tanya’s age and my brain seems to be stuck on my mom’s bitter voice on repeat: He keeps finding them younger and younger, doesn’t he?
“I’ll just go help Byron with the luggage,” Dad says, as if he thinks I’ve brought my entire apartment’s worth of clothes with me, and flees the scene almost as quickly as Byron. My dad is not great with awkward pauses.
“I’m sorry, I just—” I start, but Tanya shakes her head.
“Really, it’s okay,” she says. “I know I look young. And I figured you’d be kind of shocked by that. I’m thirty-two. I had Byron when I was sixteen.”
“Wow,” I say, though I’m not sure if I’m saying that to the fact that my soon-to-be stepmom was eight years old when I was born or that she had a son herself only eight years after that.
“I know, right? And don’t worry, I’m not going to try to be like some kind of mom to you. That would be weird.” She wrinkles her nose, and I smile.
“Yeah, maybe a bit.” I’m surprised by how much I like her already.
Surprised, and a little concerned.
After all, she’ll be my dad’s fourth wife. And just like each of his wives has been younger than the one that came before, each of his marriages has been shorter. I love my dad, but he doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to his romantic attention span.
Never trust a man, Anna-Marie, I can hear my mom say, her words slurred by too much wine. You’ll give them your best years and they still go screw the one auto mechanic in town with big tits.
I need to get out of here.
Dad and Byron shuffle back in with my suitcase and purse, and I see a temporary escape.
“Thanks, you guys, you’re the best. I’ll take that,” I say, grabbing both items from their hands before they can protest. “Am I still up in my old room?”
“Yeah,” Dad says, looking a bit surprised by my haste to escape. “Of course. Just the way you left it.”
I dearly hope my room hasn’t been sitting there gathering four years of dust and rats. Though since the one thing Wyoming doesn’t lack for is space, this house, like most others, is enormous enough it’s possible Dad hasn’t needed it for anything, even with Tanya and the kids living here, and Patrice and Joe and Grandpa staying for the reunion. “It’s great meeting you, Tanya,” I say. “I’ll go get settled in, and we’ll chat more later, yeah? Fabulous.” This is the same idiotically breezy tone industry people use as brush-offs at parties, usually followed by some quick air kisses and a “darling” or two.
I have a feeling she’s smart enough to pick up on this, but all I care about right now is hauling ass upstairs and closing myself off in my old bedroom. Which I do. The moment the door is shut behind me, I can breathe again.
I leave my suitcase and purse by the door and sit down on my bed, just taking in the room I haven’t seen in years. It looks exactly the same as before—same sky-blue bedding on the brass-framed bed, same long-expired bottles of perfume and pots of makeup on the dresser, same tiny holes in the walls from where I took down my Death Arsenal and Firefly posters the day before I moved. Same row of shiny trophies and dangling medals on a special shelf Dad built for them.
Clearly someone has cleaned in here since then because it doesn’t smell like four years of trapped air and I’m not choking on dust, but other than that it looks like the room is being kept in some weird stasis. A memorial for someone who is never really coming back.
I walk to the large mirror over the dresser and run my fingers over the photographs shoved into the edges. Younger versions of me, smiling back. Me and girlfriends I wasn’t actually that close to. Me holding trophies that now sit on that shelf. Me graduating as salutatorian (damn you, Kelsey Sprack, for edging me out by one one-hundredth of a point). Lots of me and Shane.
My phone buzzes in my purse, shaking me out of my thoughts. Gabby, most likely, checking to make sure I haven’t already turned tail and headed back to LA. I grab my phone, and my heart pounds harder when I see that it’s not Gabby calling me.
It’s Josh.
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Janci Patterson, The Extra Series, #1
