Page 4 of Broken Bayou

I hear a voice on Johnette’s phone, and I’m back in that studio, under those lights, Harper staring at me. The caller on the phone is a girl.

Maybe I’ve seen enough. I start to slowly back up, but the cart’s bad wheel gives me away.

“Ho-ly mother-of-pearl,” the woman in cutoff shorts says when she spots me. Her gaze isn’t judgmental, it’s worse. It’s sympathetic. “What are the damn odds?”

Math didn’t have to be my best subject for me to understand the odds are staggering, for them, not me. For them, looking up to see me in the flesh as they watch Johnette’s screen is insanely shocking. For me, wandering into a group of random people watching me make a complete ass of myself on live television is now, unfortunately, highly probable. Johnette could have at least waited for me to leave the store. But what fun would that have been?

I smile at the group. I fucking smile at them. What is wrong with me?

“I need your help,” the girl on Johnette’s screen says.

Her voice sounds so young, so helpless. Something in it so familiar.

I see the group weighing their options now they know I’m here.

“Dr. Willa?” Harper Beaumont says on the screen.

The group turns back. Decision made.

“Can you repeat that?” I said to the caller.

“Can you help me find it?” the girl said.

I watch my face on the screen. I look frozen in a state of shock. I heard “Can you help me hide it?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I need help finding it.”

Again, in that moment, I heard the wordhiding, notfinding.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the caller. “Are you asking me to hide something?”

Harper tilted her head and blinked her spider-leg lashes. She smiled a painful smile. “She’s asking about your book.”

“My book?”

The caller drew out one word, one syllable. “Uh ...”

My train of thought was so gone by that point that when the caller spoke again, I heard a word from my past. A word one child gave to another child. A safe word. One that should’ve made me laugh as an adult, but it didn’t make me laugh. It set my chest ablaze as if a hot brand was pressed onto it.

“Did she sayokra?” I said to Harper.

Harper laughed an uncomfortable laugh and tried to keep her composure, but her voice cracked. “What?”

“Okra. Did she say the wordokra?”

Harper looked at me like I was a complete lunatic.

“How do you know that word?” I said to the caller.

“Um.” Harper’s eyes darted around the room. For the first time, she looked her age. She fumbled over her words. “Maybe, um, we are all out of time.”

I sprang up, tugged at the microphone threaded through my shirt. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore. I need to go.” I detached the mic pack from around my waist as Harper gaped at me, but I still couldn’t unhook the mic and wire from my blouse. So I ripped it off. The mic, the wire, the pack. And my blouse.

I stood there on live television in my bra, claw marks from my manicured nails on my chest.

I looked down. “Fuck.”