Whatever Doesn't Kill You (20 page)

“Yeah. So what?”

“She's dating Dave the waiter?” I'm hysterical by this point, laughing so hard there are tears in my eyes.

“Yeah. So what? What's funny?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands. I don't even know why I find that so amusing. “I'm sure he's very nice.”

“He is. He came to McDonald's with us yesterday. He says he's going to take me fishing in the spring.”

“That's awesome. It really is.” I throw an arm around Wex and give him a kiss on top of his head. “It's just…it's funny the way life works out sometimes, isn't it?”

“I guess.” He ducks out from under my arm and picks up his game controller again. “I mean, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?”

“What? Where did you hear that?”

He shrugs. “
TV
,” he says.

“Of course you did.”

I leave Wex to beat up the guy in his computer game and head off to my room. I flop down on the chair in the corner and dig out the sweater I've been knitting for Simon. As infuriating as he can be, he really is a decent guy, I guess.

TWO MONTHS LATER

I'm the last one to finish my lunch—leftover Chinese food Emily brought home from the restaurant—and I slide my Rubbermaid lunch container into my backpack and look up to find everyone staring at me.

“Oh, were you all waiting for me?”

“Yeah, little Miss Gourmet.” Griffin had a peanut butter sandwich today, and the whole time I was eating, I could see him out of the corner of my eye, coveting my cold chicken wings and chow mein.

“All right, who was the asshole yesterday?”

“I think it was Griffin,” says Katie.

“Griffin's always the asshole,” chimes in Ashley.

“Very funny.” Griffin pulls his deck of cards out of his backpack and shuffles. He makes a big production of it. “This is the faro shuffle. It looks simple, but it's very tricky.” He drops about fifteen cards on the floor.

“How about I shuffle?” Ashley grabs the remainder of the deck from him and shuffles while Griffin gathers up the cards on the floor.

“Wow, you're really good at that,” Marie-Claire tells her. “You should work in the casino or something.”

It took some doing on my part, but Ashley has fit quite nicely into our bizarre little club. I'll confess that things were weird for a while. I felt like a double agent, going back and forth between Katie and Ashley before I finally managed to convince Katie that Ashley wasn't such a bad sort once you got her away from the Jerk Squad. And once Katie and Ashley were square, Marie-Claire and Griffin were fine with her as well. Now Ashley and Marie-Claire are best buddies, and Griffin is in love with her. And it's funny: since Ashley has joined our group, I haven't heard anything more about Marie-Claire's vampire parties. I don't know if Ashley has dragged Marie-Claire out shopping yet, but she's actually started wearing colored clothes. I've never asked Marie-Claire what she was doing in Tim Hortons with a book of crosswords instead of being off partying with college boys like she always told us she was. I figure that's her secret to share if she ever wants to. After all, it's not like she's covering up a murder or something.

Ashley starts to deal the cards, and she really does look professional doing it. If we were playing something more complicated than Asshole, I might worry that she was some kind of card shark. “So when is Emily moving?” she asks.

“First of the month.”

“That's so weird.” Katie picks up her cards and starts sorting through them. “That apartment is going to seem so big without her and Wex.”

“Well, they're not going far. They're just going to be moving upstairs. I'm sure Wex will be over, like, six times a day. And Dave-the-waiter seems like a nice guy.”

“When does Simon start school?”

“At the beginning of June. He's taking some summer classes to update his math and computer stuff, and then he starts full time in September. Accounting. Yawn. But at least he'll be making good money when he's done.”

“So weird.” Katie grins. “It's nice to hear about good things happening for a change.”

“Dude, it's nice to
have
good things happening for a change.” I take my worst card, the two of clubs, and hand it to Marie-Claire, who is the janitor this round. She hands me back the ace of hearts.

On the one hand, it's weird that things got back to normal pretty fast after the whole Travis Bingham Incident. On the other, it's not like they went back to the way they were before either. Simon seems more like a human being, for starters. He's starting to talk about his own future as if he's actually got one, and Emily…well, she was getting better even before I told her I'd met Travis. And speaking of Travis, Simon went to see him at work a few days after our breakfast at the Bedrock Bistro. Simon told me they sat in his truck and talked for over an hour, but he wouldn't tell me what they talked about. I guess that's another one of those secrets that's none of my business.

I look around at my odd little group of friends. The funny thing about family, I guess, is that if you don't have the one you need, you can always make your own. People still make fun of Katie for her weight, of Ashley for her spectacular downward social slide, of me for dressing funny (it seems that no one except for my immediate group of friends has noticed I've stopped doing that) and of Griffin for…well, being Griffin. But that's to be expected, I suppose. Anybody who doesn't fit the mold around here gets singled out, even if the mold is broken. And if you've got a safe place to fall, even if it's the International Society of Creeps, Freaks and Weirdos, it's easier to feel like everything will work out all right in the end.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to all the friends and early readers who helped out with this project. Thanks especially to my group of Friday Night Crazies—Laura, Joan, Duane, Becky and Linda—and to Lynda Simmons for the notes and encouragement. I wouldn't have gotten to the end without all of you! Also, thanks to my loves, Chuck, Max and Ari, and to my friend Shannon Robinson, who really wanted to find out the ending.

ELIZABETH WENNICK
grew up in Germany and Burlington, Ontario, and spent a number of wonderful years on Canada's east coast before moving back to Ontario. Her love of all things artistic has driven her to pursue drawing, knitting, sewing, painting and, most recently, carpentry and furniture design. She has worked at various times as a journalist, arts and crafts instructor, video-store manager, photo-lab technician and personal concierge to ridiculously rich Americans. She has written two novels, a weekly humor column for several southern Ontario newspapers and many short plays, and has co-written two musicals. Elizabeth currently lives in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband, two sons, two cats, a dog and varying degrees of chaos.