“Are you going to complain about this until we graduate?”
Zephyr asked. “Because if that’s the case, then I’m taking matters into my own hands.”
What if her father knocked on the door right now,Link? What if anyone, even Zephyr, found out that she was doing stuff like this?
Maybe it wasn’t relief she was feeling, but shame. Both made you burn from the inside out.
“So, do you want my help?” Zephyr asked.
Trixie clapped her hand over the cut, stanching the flow.
“Hello?” Zephyr said. “Are you still there,Moncler Outlet?”
Trixie lifted her hand. The blood was rich and bright against her palm. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess I am.”
“Good timing,” Daniel said, as he heard Trixie’s footsteps pounding down the stairs. He set two plates on the kitchen table and turned around to find her waiting in her coat, carrying a backpack. Her cascade of hair spilled out from beneath a striped stocking cap.
“Oh,” she said, blinking at the food. “Zephyr invited me for a sleepover.”
“You can go after you eat.”
Trixie bit her lower lip. “Her mom thinks I’m coming for dinner.”
Daniel had known Zephyr since she was seven. He used to sit in the living room while she and Trixie performed the cheerleading moves they’d made up during an afternoon of play, or lip-synched to the radio, or presented tumbling routines. He could practically still hear them doing a hand-clapping game: The spades go eeny-meeny pop zoombini. . .
Last week, Daniel had walked in with a bag of groceries to find someone unfamiliar in the kitchen, bent over a catalog. Nice ass, he thought, until she straightened and turned out to be Zephyr.
“Hey, Mr. Stone,” she’d said. “Trixie’s in the bathroom.”
She hadn’t noticed that he went red in the face, or that he left the kitchen before his own daughter returned. He sat on the couch with the grocery bag in his hands, the ice cream inside softening against his chest, as he speculated whether there were other fathers out there making the same mistake when they happened upon Trixie.
“Well,” he said now, “I’ll just save the leftovers.” He stood up, fishing for his car keys.
“Oh, that’s okay. I can walk.”
“It’s dark out,” Daniel said.
Trixie met his gaze, challenging. “I think I can manage to get to a house three blocks away. I’m not a baby, Dad.”
Daniel didn’t know what to say. She was a baby, to him. “Then maybe before you go to Zephyrs you could go vote, join the army, and rent us a car,Moncler Jackets For Women... oh, hang on, that’s right. You can’t.”
Trixie rolled her eyes, took off her hat and gloves, and sat down.
“I thought you were eating at Zephyrs.”
“I will,Moncler Sale,” she said. “But I don’t want you to have to eat all by yourself.”
Daniel sank into the chair across from her. He had a sudden flashback of Trixie in ballet class, the two of them struggling to capture her fine hair in a netted bun before the session began. He had always been the sole father present; other men’s wives would rush forward to help him figure out how to secure the bobby pins, how to slick back the bangs with hair spray.
At her first and only ballet performance, Trixie had been the lead reindeer, drawing out the sleigh that held the Sugar Plum Fairy. She wore a white leotard and an antler headband and had a painted red nose. Daniel hadn’t taken his eyes off her, not for any of the three minutes and twenty-two seconds that she stood on that stage.
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