Dead Little Mean Girl

“Not my business, but if I noticed, your mother will.” I put down the book and leaned over the couch arm, sweeping the bangs from my eyes when they fell in front of my glasses. “Okay, so either you’re working twelve-hour shifts or you’re seeing someone. What’s up?”

Quinn rarely engaged in deep thought, so when her face scrunched up and her head tilted to the side, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Constipation, maybe. Or the beginnings of a stroke. But then she flopped onto the chair beside me, moving in so close I couldn’t miss her Eau du Donut: a combination of grease, sugar and hazelnut.

“I’m seeing an older man. Like, way older,” she said.

That she had a boyfriend didn’t surprise me. That she was seeing an “older man” did but only because she was so very particular with her arm candy. She was also particular about how she presented herself when she went out with people—she always looked great, smelled great. Right then, she had jelly on her shoulder and coffee stains on her pants. Her Romeo must have really liked donuts.

Maybe Quinn was doing Homer Simpson.

“How much older?”

“His forties. He says he loves me. Like, I think I might love him. He makes me feel so... Look what he bought me.” She reached into her pocket and produced gold hoop earrings with leafy charms dangling from the bottoms. Emeralds, maybe. Or peridots.

“Are those real?” I admired the pretty before my brain kicked in and told me this is really wrong. “Wait. It doesn’t matter if they’re real. Holy crap. You’re seventeen! He’s fortysomething? That’s statutory in this state. Like, he could go to jail.”

“That’s why you can’t say anything. I’m trusting you with this. Don’t screw me over. Please. I’m happy and I don’t want to ruin it.”

My tongue twisted. This guy was as old as her dad, which maybe was the point. Was this some Electra complex manifesting? A result of neglect? Her dad rarely called, and when he did, it was for five or ten minutes before he was making his excuses. Heck, my dad flew planes back and forth to Dubai for rich businessmen but I still heard from him once a week.

I rubbed the heel of my palm against my temple. It was a lot to take in, and nothing I could say would make any of it better. Quinn did the strangest thing then—she reached for me, her pointy fingernails digging into the back of my hand.

“Promise me,” she demanded. “Please? I love him.”

It was the please that got me. For all Quinn’s faults, she rarely asked me for anything. True, that was because she either didn’t like to acknowledge I was alive or was too busy torturing me to want or need stuff, but she hadn’t come to me so much as I’d gone to her. I’d inserted myself and it’d be a bad showing to screw her over with it.

She gave my hand another squeeze.

I groaned in defeat.

“Fine. I promise I won’t say anything. But I’m going on the record here. It’s creepy and you should be careful.”

“I will,” she promised. And for the first and last time in my life, Quinn pulled me into a hug. Despite all expectations otherwise, lightning did not strike me dead.

* * *

Quinn’s spring/winter romance continued for another three weeks. She didn’t miss any more practices, but she did spend her weekend days exchanging bodily fluids with her mysterious dude and, in turn, collecting valuable prizes. A necklace. New lingerie. An iPad. She tried to give me the sordid details once, showing me the rug burn she got from Old Boyfriend’s car upholstery, but I declined story time, telling her there weren’t enough therapists to fix my tender brain meats if she continued talking.

She laughed and called me childish. I was okay with that.

Sadly for Quinn, the Bella and Edward of donuts were not to be. Quinn came home on a Thursday night slinging curses that would have made a sailor blush. I was playing video games at the time with my noise-canceling headphones on, but somehow, Quinn’s banshee wails trumped soundproofing technology.

I went downstairs to check on her only to see her chuck the Bouncing Bear hat across the kitchen.

“I hate him! I hate him! I am... I hate him so much!”

“Are you okay?”

“Leave me alone!”

“Good talk! Leaving you alone.” I returned to my virtual playground where, unlike my kitchen, demolitions were an acceptable form of problem solving. Ten minutes later, a wet, bathrobe-clad Quinn haunted my threshold.

“I hate him so much.” She threw herself at my bed, muffling her shriek of rage in my Domo-kun pillow. I paused the game and waited. She’d stop leaking her psycho all over my stuff eventually, and I was guessing she’d want to talk at that point.

It took her a few minutes to collect herself. She lifted her head, looked at the fuzzy brown monster with fangs who’d been her tissue, and flung it across the room. Poor Domo-kun. Reduced to a snot rag and discarded.

“S-so he says he can’t leave his wife. That they’ve been together too long. I thought he loved me,” she warbled. It was clear by the jut of her chin she was on the verge of sobbing.

Raw emotion from a goodness vacuum such as Quinn Littleton was not an eventuality I was prepared for.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” she demanded.

“I... Yeah. I’m sorry you’re hurt.” I didn’t know how to navigate these waters. I could handle Quinn when she was in typical mean girl mode because that’s what I knew. That was her modus operandi. This vulnerable, softer-side-of-Sears Quinn threw me off guard. She looked so fragile and human.

I sucked in a breath. “He didn’t deserve you. Plus, when he’s sixty you’ll be thirty. There’s not enough Viagra in the world to cover that.”

I didn’t expect her to appreciate what I’d said, but she smiled, rolling onto her back to look at my ceiling. “He said he loved me.”

“Of course he did. He wanted to do you. It’s the oldest cliché in the book.” Her expression turned far less friendly. I hadn’t meant to criticize her, only I guess I had by suggesting she’d let herself be taken advantage of. I winced. “You know what else is an old cliché? A woman scorned. You’ll do better now. Better than him.”

“A woman scorned,” she repeated.

She lifted her butt off my bed to pull her phone from the pocket of her robe. Her thumbs flew. I glanced over to her screen only to see a picture of Quinn with a silver-tipped head jammed between her ample boobies while she grinned at the camera. Then there was another picture that...okay, that was a nipple. I didn’t need to see that, so I looked away. I hadn’t signed on for sisterly areolas.

Quinn kept typing.

“He wants to dump me? Whatever. You’re right. I will do better. But while I’m doing better, I’m going to make sure he has the worst day of his life.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Quinn paused to smirk at me, one brow lifted, her eyes full of flint. “Texting his wife. She really ought to know what he’s doing behind her back. A woman scorned, right?”

“Oh,” I said. Because what else could I say? I’d fed fire to the fire god. The inferno was a foregone conclusion.

Chapter Six (#u1f2f817b-793a-535a-9433-d971c2868331)

It never occurred to me that Quinn shouldn’t have the cell number of her ex-dude’s wife. The house phone would have made sense, but she said she was texting Mrs. Cheated On. Unless the married couple shared a cell...

Naaaaah. It was much more convoluted than that.

I went over Nikki’s house to hang out with her, Laney and Tommy for Shitty Movie Night. It was a thing we did the first Friday of every month wherein we found the dumbest movie on Netflix, ordered pizza, drank gallons of soda and mercilessly mocked the film. We were buzzards on a fresh corpse. It was great.

It is great. We still do it.

We were at the “waiting for the pizza guy to show up” portion of the night, laying siege to Nikki’s downstairs family room with the surround sound, big-screen TV and comfortable leather theater seating, when Quinn came up in conversation, albeit in a roundabout way.

“Big goings-on at the Bear,” Laney said, sprawled across Tommy’s lap, her heels perched on the armrest of the couch. Her black lips, pale powdered skin and straight black hair made her look especially Morticia, which was a compliment by Laney’s standards.

“What’s up?” Nikki was painting her toenails rainbow colors, a weird pink foamy thing separating her toes so she didn’t smudge. Her glittery lacquer matched her neon skull leggings. Looking between her and Laney, I felt like the only girl present who couldn’t be in a rock band. I was relegated to nerdy groupie or maybe, if I was lucky, band manager.