Deep Fried and Pickled (Book One - The Rachael O'Brien Chronicles) (3 page)

“Ah, Tuke,” Macy said. “Dan’s not a guy. It’s a racial abbreviation.”

Tuke stiffened and processed the letters like a crossword.

Exasperated, Francine asked, “You southern?”

“Born and raised,” he said, and the meaning registered. A tsk slid off his tongue as he shook his head. He touched the paint with a finger. Still wet, it smeared. “Any you ladies hear noises last night?”

Macy, Katie Lee, and I shook our heads.

Tuke walked the halls of the dorm, checked the staircases, and questioned everyone on our hall about last night. Time ticked still as the morning drama unfolded. Francine’s door distracted Katie Lee and Macy from noticing the turmoil I kept to myself. Like Francine, I’d had a morning jolt, but unlike her, I knew the face of the person who’d rejected me, whereas her nemesis hid behind a can of spray paint.

A replacement door arrived late morning, and Tuke left after he installed it. Macy, Katie Lee, and Francine had classes, but I stayed behind. Keeping the blinds shut, I buried my head in my pillow. Maybe the news about Mom was wrong. There could have been an emergency, a miscommunication. Maybe she was being blackmailed.

The phone rang again, and I wondered if my mother had received a cosmic signal to call me with an explanation or just to tell me, she was okay.

“O’Brien,” Katie Lee said. “Get over here. We saved you a spot.”

My head hovered in a sticky emotional-web. “Where are you?”

“The nastyteria, waiting for you.”

I TRUDGED ACROSS CAMPUS Drive feeling emotionally strung out, unable to remember or care if I’d brushed my hair and locked the dorm door. I couldn’t be bothered. This was all wrong. I was the one who was supposed to go away to find myself, not Mom.

Somewhere in the kitchen, someone was having a lousy day, and I could relate. The acrid smell of deep-fried-charred-oil wafted in the air. The burnt stink suffocated the entire cafeteria, even the table in the back, where Katie Lee and Macy had saved me a seat. I didn’t know why I’d agreed to meet them. Curled under the covers in my dark room, brooding about Mom was where I wanted to be. Why couldn’t she be normal and just have an affair?

The numbness that lingered inside my chest overpowered my appetite. I did little more than pick at the edges of the meat and cheese layers in my Italian sub. I wondered if I should go home to be with Dad, but staring at him wouldn’t bring Mom back. Besides, what if she tried to call me at school?

Rubbing her thumb across her blood red nail polish, Macy randomly clicked the underside of her nails. “There isn’t shit going on. This place sucks.”

Katie Lee dipped a hush puppy into soft butter. “Y’all, I know where we could go Friday. I hear a decent crowd turns up at the Holiday Inn bar.”

Macy huffed a throaty guffaw. “You have to be kidding. Partying at the Holiday Inn?”

“This sounds made up,” I said. “Where did you hear about the Holiday Inn?”

Katie Lee ripped open three sugar packets and tapped them into her sweet tea. “I overheard two cute guys talking by the elevator.”

Arranging fries in a puddle of ketchup, I scoffed. “Holiday Inn? As in cheap hotel? With a bathtub-sized swimming pool and vending machines as meal service?”

Katie Lee’s eyes roamed the cafeteria. “It’s week two,” she reminded us, “and I’m tired of staring at our dorm walls.”

“We’ve got one problem,” Macy said “The drinking age. It’s twenty-one.”

Considering consequences, I ranked the humiliation of being arrested and thrown in the clinker for underage drinking at the Holiday Inn a worse offense than flunking out. “We can’t get in,” I told the girls. “They’ll card us.”

Chewing on her bottom lip roused Katie Lee’s inner magic fairy. She zipped her index finger in the air and sparked extra twinkle from her lagoon eyes. “We can go to the registration office. Tell them we’ve lost our school I.D.’s.”

I pushed my tray aside. “What good will that do? Unless we get our birth date changed.”

Katie Lee winked while Macy stopped her annoying nail clicking long enough to ask, “Who’s going first?”

My mom, it seemed, had pretended to love my dad and me. Raw emotion grappled from inside. “I hate fakes and scams. Besides, what bar would let us in with doctored student I.D.’s?”

As much as I thought I wanted to party and meet ‘the guy,’ I didn’t want to get busted in the process. I did my best to squash the idea, hoping we’d discover some place less illegal to drink, and some other way to do it.

Something with apples and cinnamon was baking in the ovens, gradually overpowering the charred smell. “Come on, Rach,” Katie Lee said. “No one will check.”

I tried to reason with the two. “If we get caught forging an official document, chances are we’ll get kicked out of school.”

Ignoring my commentary, Katie Lee stood and walked toward the kitchen. Moments later, she returned with three warm apple-strudel tarts. She sank a fork into one. “Y’all, I’ll go first.”

NOTE TO SELF

Fake I.D.: the ultimate ticket to a more meaningful university experience? TBD.

3

B
lood,
D
rugs
A
nd
F
orgery

The
afternoon heat sweltered and everything but the humming cicadas stood still. Like the locked heat index, my mind lingered on Mom. I’d been away at school four days before my parents relationship collapsed. Dad had gone on crisis mode for two days before he called me with news that Mom had left. He didn’t say it, but he had to have been freaking out. I was, and knew it had to be ten times worse for him. When I returned from my afternoon classes, I called to make sure he was eating, sleeping and not doing anything stupid.

“I’ve had a haircut, and I’m staying busy,” he assured me. “I’ve accepted a commission to refurbish six Clementine Hunter paintings for her hundredth birthday celebration.”

“That’s cool. Museum or private collector?”

His voice filled with pride. “New Orleans Museum of Art.”

“Who do you know in the south that recommended you?”

I thought I detected gloating when he said, “One of the curators noticed the van in Greensboro. Once we talked, they checked my references and awarded me the commission.”

Pride inside of me swelled. Although Dad’s personal life hung in chaotic uncertainty, professionally he’d worked hard to attain a reputation for his meticulous attention to detail. This was a big deal and my chest weighed heavy knowing neither Mom nor I was home to help him celebrate. I still couldn’t believe she’d bolted. Mindlessly, I twirled the phone cord around my finger and stared out the window at Campus Drive, waiting for someone to say, ‘April Fools!’ or ‘Gotcha.’ Something to make the reality of Mom’s unexpected departure—different. Before I found heartfelt words, Katie Lee distracted me. In full peacock strut, she parade-marched the length of our nine-by-twelve cell while waving her rectangular card in the air. Making an excuse, I hung up.

I snatched her prized possession.

“Let me see that.”

Katie Lee’s two by three-and-a-half inch university photo I.D. card was still warm from the laminate machine. Under the university seal, she was a twenty-one-year-old freshman. She’d secured her golden ticket to a night of drunken bliss.

A milkshake of emotional anxiety and boredom can warp one’s perspective of fun. I handed Katie Lee my I.D. and said, “Hide this.”

“Why?”

“So I can get a new one with a clear conscience.”

THE REGISTRAR’S OFFICE WAS in the windowless basement of the Humanities and Science building. There was an overlying scent of formaldehyde. The woman behind the flip-top wooden counter styled her Clairol medium-blonde locks in a bouffant and wore a shift dress with billowy sleeves. I told her I’d lost my I.D.. Curling her lips in a glum frown, she handed me a form to fill out. After a ten-minute wait, I paid a twenty dollar replacement I.D. fee and left with my new card.

I wasn’t proud that I’d lied about my birth date on an official form. You weren’t supposed to do that until you turned thirty. I’d probably broken a state law. Knowing my Mom had hit the road with a group of traveling head cases, and spending my free time in the company of books while living in mock prison quarters was a recipe for emotional turmoil. If I got busted, I figured I could plead insanity.

Finally, I had plans. I’d be spending Friday night at the Holiday Inn. Since I hadn’t found any cute, witty men on campus, I hoped that this was where they were hiding. Drinking and dating weren’t approved activities under Mom and Dad’s roof. But Mom had left Dad, and I wasn’t living with either one anymore. I planned to make up for lost time.

KATIE LEE’S HOMETOWN BOYFRIEND
,
Nash, was nocturnal and always called after eleven. They’d dated for two years in high school, and she professed to anyone who’d listen that she’d found her soul mate. Trying to pace myself on the personal information intake, I often ended up across the hall, in Macy’s beanbag, and hoped Katie Lee and Nash’s phone conversation would be brief so I could get some sleep.

Being a Greek, New Yorker, Macy embodied more oompa than the average eighteen-year old. At least more than any I’d ever met. I unpeeled my late night snack and offered her half of my Slim Jim.

Fluttering her hand in front of her crinkled nose, she squeaked, “Eugh,” which I took as a ‘no thanks.’

“Rach,” she reminded me, “I’m a strict vegetarian.”

Despite her meat abstinence, she surrendered animal magnetism when she danced with her laundry to the B52’s. She folded a towel or T-shirt during the pauses and slow parts of the songs. Every piece of clothing she pulled from the basket was black, gray or blue, except her underwear. Those were bright colors constructed from lacey fabrics. Macy’s physique resembled a roller coaster, and her bras, easily two-cup sizes larger than mine, gave me feelings of inadequacy. When she opened her underwear drawer, I was transfixed by the discovery of what could only be a tunnel into Candyland. The neatly folded stacks of intimate apparel provided a wealth of information that I was uncomfortable knowing.

When the late night news ended, Macy’s door swayed open, and it clunked against the gray plastic wall-bumper. Her TV provided the only illumination in the room and cast a luminescent glow around Katie Lee’s shadowy figure. Her shoulders slumped, and her slipper sock feet were making a whisk-whisk noise. Macy clicked on her study light, and we both watched Katie Lee’s curled fists window-wash mascara and tears into raccoon rings around her eyes. Macy turned the TV off and wrapped her arm around Katie Lee’s shoulders. “You’re a mess.”

I softened my voice. “What’s going on? Did you have a fight with Nash?” I didn’t mean to send her over an emotional waterfall, but my question opened her tear ducts. By the time she calmed down, she’d filled the garbage can to the rim with tissues and I estimated that she’d killed at least one small tree.

“Nash was in a car accident. I should be with him, but I’m stuck here. Y’all, it happened in New Bern, near my house.”

A minute ago, I would have slept through David Letterman, but now she had my attention. “When was this?”

“Yesterday. Late afternoon.”

Macy guided Katie Lee to her twin bed and offered her a pillow. “What happened?”

“To miss an oncoming vehicle, his Chevy truck lurched inta a ditch, and he knocked his head into the steering wheel.” She sniffled and blew her nose. “His windshield broke, and glass cut his hands and face. He probably had a slight concussion, but managed to walk over to our house to lie down.”

Macy sat upright. “Why didn’t he call sooner?”

Katie Lee sniffled. “He passed out at our house and didn’t feel well enough to call me until now.”

Holding the beanbag to my backside, I moved closer to the bed. “Wait a minute. Your dad’s a doctor, did he examine Nash’s injuries?”

“Mama and Daddy are attendin’ a medical conference in Beaufort. They weren’t due back until this evenin’.”

“Wait a minute. How did Nash get in?”

Katie Lee crimped her eyebrows at my question but graciously enlightened me. “Southerners don’t lock doors.”

“For real?” I asked, and Katie Lee brushed over my astonishment. My father was a lock addict. He added deadbolts to doors and even locked his toolbox that he kept in the latched cabinet behind the padlocked garage. In my family, we locked doors. 

“Nash called some friends. They came over to give him a tow and help get him home.”

“Is he okay now?” Macy asked.

“He says so, but his voice sounds weak. I think he’s keepin’ some details of his injuries from me so I won’t worry. I should be home takin’ care of him.”

FRIDAY, I AWOKE TO a dull ache behind my eyeballs and a gurgle in my stomach. I’d stayed up consoling Katie Lee, but tonight I might be the one who needed solace. If I was busted using my fake student I.D., my dad might get a call from the police to bail my ass out of jail. The thought made me queasy, and I reached for the Pepto-Bismol. Normally I didn’t touch the stuff, but I had a morning lecture to sit through, so I chugged from the bottle.

Knowing Katie Lee worried about Nash, I speculated that she’d leave for the weekend to be with him. She was my only non-wussy excuse for bailing out on the planned outing at the Holiday Inn. Adding nonchalance to my voice, I asked, “Did you talk to Nash this morning? Are you going home to see him?”

“He’s doing better. I don’t have a ride home, and he convinced me to stay. It’ll do me some good to get off campus for a drink.”

My stomach corkscrewed. “Do you think there’s a chance we’ll get busted?”

Katie Lee spritzed perfume above her head and walked underneath, dousing herself in a flowery mist. “It’s just a night out. Honestly, the worst thing that’ll happen is they’ll turn us away.”

She pulled a robe and basket of shower essentials from her closet, and I asked, “Why did you put on perfume if you’re going to shower?”