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Thirty

The weather copies my mood for the next few days, and that would be great if I were happy or something. But the rain and wind, the sleet, then the snow... it’s just a little too much for me. It’s already dark by 4:30 on Tuesday and I’m heading toward another night of me doing homework and then going to bed with a random nature documentary on before anyone who’d order an early bird special would when the phone rings.

It hasn’t rung in so long that I forgot we had a landline. It trills again, muffled.

“That scared the shit out of me,” my mom hisses, wide-eyed with her hand clutched to her chest. “Can you get that, please?” She turns back to her lunch bag where she’s stuffing celery sticks.

I unearth the phone from a pile of coupons that slide onto the floor and answer. “Hello?”

“Hi, is this the Easy Easel?” a deep voice asks.

I nearly drop the phone.No.

“I saw the sign in your yard,” it continues. “My son’s six and he really needs a creative outlet—”

With my heart hammering, I hang up and throw the phone on the counter, causing the rest of the coupons to slide off. I don’t even bother with shoes before throwing open the door and marching outside. The fibers of my sock stick to the bits of ice lingering on our driveway, but I keep pressing forward, the whole way to the sign sitting innocently in our front yard. It’s been there so long that I hadn’t looked twice at it since my grandma’s heart attack. It was just always there. Faded and worn, but there.

I stomp onto the snow, my feet burning from the cold, and try to rip the small wooden sign out.

“Saine? What happened—” My mom stops mid-sentence to gape at me fighting with the sign.

“This stupid piece of shit!” I scream at it. The ground has frozen around it. It refuses to give up my grandma, but if I had to, then it definitely has to. I yank until my fingers are frozen and raw, until it wiggles free and I fall on my ass.

“Hey,” my mom says, helping me up, “what’s going on? Are you okay?”

My face feels chapped, windblown, and tight. It’s not until she pushes away a tear that I realize any managed to leak out in the low temperature.

“Why do we still have this stupid thing up?” I throw the sign into the driveway. It skids a few feet until it hits the tire of our car. “There’s no one here to teach lessons.”

“I didn’t even think about it.” She ushers me back inside, herhands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry. Did someone—was someone trying to schedule a lesson?”

“Yeah, but they won’t make that mistake again.” I wipe away another tear and peel off my socks. The floor, which is usually arctic levels of cold on my bare feet, feels warm enough to thaw me.

I try to break away from my mom to get into warm, dry clothes, but she just holds on to me tighter. “What?”

“We should talk about this.”

“I don’t want to.” I take a breath in.Five-six-seven-eight.“I’m fine.”

She meets my eyes, and it’s unwelcome how much they look like mine. How much they look like my grandma’s. “You’re very clearly not fine.”

I look away. “You have to go to work.”

“Screw work.”

“Yeah,” I laugh bitterly. “Tell that to the power company.”

“This is about more than just the phone call.”

I sniff, shuffling my foot against the other. “It’s been a bad week.”

She raises her eyebrows. “It’s Tuesday.”

“A badyear.” I sniff. “I’m mad—really mad, but I don’t have any right to be.” I shake my head. “I don’t know why I’m mad.”

“Of course you have a right to be. Awful things have happened and you made some mistakes. You’re mad at the world and you’re mad atyourself.”

“You always have to work,” I croak out. “And Grandma is gone. None of my friends like me anymore and, even if theydid, they wouldn’t for long because I’m depressing to be around and I screw everything up. When you leave, I just go to bed so I don’t have to think or replay me messing up over and over again.” The devastated, angry looks Holden and Corrine gave me rewind and repeat in my head every night until unconsciousness takes pity on my pathetic self and sweeps me away.