Page 78 of Goode Vibrations
“Yeah. Look up Type-A overachiever alpha sister, that’s Charlie. Goody-goody, followed the rules, the golden oldest. Look at your sister, look what she did, look at her grades. She’s going to Princeton, blah blah blah.” She huffed. “Granted, Mom never actually said any of that out loud to any of us, but she didn’t have to.”
“But you’re not bitter at all.”
She snickered. “Nope. Not me.” A laughing sigh. “Maybe a little bitter. Because I couldn’t hack it. I’ve been telling myself that college just wasn’t for me, that I’m meant to be an artist, to hoe my own row instead of following Charlie’s. But dropping out of college still feels like I failed to measure up to Charlie.”
“Is she the type to lord it over you?” I asked.
“That’s the hardest part—no, she’s not. She’s just sweet and humble, mostly. I’m lording it over myself for her.”
“Well, maybe you ought to put down that burden.”
“Yeah, no shit, right? I’m working on it.” She gestured at the Ketchikan skyline, rising to meet us as we angled for the pier. “Problem is all of them. They’re all waiting for me. They have expectations of me. Mom does, I know. I dropped out, so she expects me to make the most of being an artist. Charlie is successful, Cassie has a whole new life with this Ink dude, and that was after the car wreck ruined her dance career. She was a professional dancer, like in Europe, touring and performing for, like, royalty and shit. Then there was a car wreck and she moved in with Mom, and now she’s successful at this whole new thing. Lexie is marrying a legit, bona fide superstar, and she’s becoming famous herself. Torie is the only one who hasn’t accomplished much, but when I talked to Mom as we were getting on the ferry, it sounded like she was with a guy and things were changing for her. So then it’ll be just me with no fucking clue what I’m doing with my life.”
“You’re not even nineteen, Poppy.”
“By the time you were nineteen, you’d been all over the world as a professional musician.”
“You’re not me. And you’re crazy talented. You just have to figure out how to leverage it into a career. That can take time.”
“You’ve never even seen my real art. The photographs are the just the…base, you could say.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing your finished pieces, Poppy, more than I can say, really. But I don’t need to have seen them to know you’ve got what it takes. You could make a career out of your photography alone, and I say that not as the guy who’s attracted to you and cares about you, but as a professional photographer. And if, as you say, your real bag is painting, then that would mean you’re even better at that. It’s a no-brainer you’ll be totally fucking brilliant.”
She let out a breath. “Thanks. I guess I need the encouragement.”
She tugged on her hair, which she wore loose today, under a floppy fedora hat. Her outfit was clearly meant to impress her family—voluminous, loose, gauzy skirt in an eye-waveringly bright pattern of yellow and red blocks, with a plain white blouse of a type you’d see “tavern wenches” wear at a renaissance fair, complete with a wide leather belt around her waist which only served to accentuate the bulging overflow of her tits, which the shirt couldn’t even begin to contain. Her cleavage was mountainous, and once again she wore no bra; the thin fabric was nearly sheer, and left just enough to the imagination that I was doomed to sport a middling hard-on all day. Especially those piercings. She even had a nose ring, a diamond stud through one nostril, which I hadn’t realized she had.
“What?” I asked. “You’re still stewing on something.”
“Just nervous. I haven’t seen my whole family in a while. Last Christmas everyone was scattered across the country, and we couldn’t make our schedules work to all meet. I had finals when Charlie had time off, and Lexie and Cassie were…well, it doesn’t matter. We video-conferenced each other and we sent each other presents, but we weren’t together. It was rough, actually. I missed them all, of course. But now I’m showing up with you, and…”
“And we’re a sort of…unknown quantity. Even with each other, in some respects.”
“Right. And on top of that, I’m about to meet a whole slew of new people, and from what Mom says, they’re all like family to her, which means I’m expected to become part of that.”
“And you don’t want to?” I knew I sounded unfairly angry. “I’d give anything to have family, Pop. Especially as much as you have.”
She huffed. “I know, I know. It’s just…it’s a lot.”
“Well, you’re not alone.”
Her smile was relieved and thankful and intimate. “And I’m more grateful for that than I can say.”
“How long until the wedding?” I asked. “Because I have to admit, I’m getting pretty well desperate for you to show me how grateful you are.”
She rested her head on my shoulder, but her posture was tight, controlled. “Desperate isn’t even the word, Errol.”
There wasn’t much else to say as the ferry slid up to the pier and tied off.
Being an orphan, I was always alone. I was always the odd man out, the newcomer, the strange face. So I wasn’t nervous about meeting new people.
It was the fact that I was meeting new people as someone else’s someone. I’d never been that, before.
We weren’t putting ourselves in any kind of box, and I always loathed the boyfriend/girlfriend labels. They felt cheap and childish. This felt way more intense than merely being herboyfriend. I was her someone, and this was her family, and I had no clue how to behave, how to be, who I was in this context.
I didn’t think she knew either.
We’d have to figure it out one step at a time, like everything else.