No Privacy

 

“DID YOU MAKE a friend?” Mom asked.

Inside the Coach, everyone was awake and eating breakfast, Rex’s bed converted back into a table.

“I don’t have any friends,” Odette answered. She looked around, for somewhere—anywhere—to be alone. The only door in the whole stupid Coach was to the bathroom, so she headed there, depositing Georgie on Dad’s lap.

Odette shut the flimsy door and locked it behind her, closed the toilet lid, and sat down. The walls were getting closer and tighter. They must be. Was the bathroom always this small? As she sat on the toilet, her knees reached halfway across the bathroom. She didn’t even want to think about what it must be like for her dad, with his long, skinny legs—bird legs, Mom called them—when he had to use the toilet.

Odette closed her eyes to make the bathroom go away. She tried to take deep breaths and count to ten, but she only made it to six before she heard a scratching sound from inside the little shower cube just across from the toilet.

It could be a zombie. Maybe that’s why the Coach was for sale in the first place. Maybe it was zombie-infested.

Odette opened her eyes. She stood up and squared her shoulders. She pulled back the shower curtain.

It wasn’t a zombie. It was Rex’s ferret, a long white tube of a creature, snuffling around by the shower drain. Above him hung his green and white striped hammock, attached to the shower walls by suction cups.

Odette had forgotten that Dad set the ferret up in here. “This way,” he’d said, “when we make a sharp turn or hit a bump, the ferret won’t slip and slide. He’ll just rock in the hammock like a baby.”

Even in the bathroom of the Coach, Odette wasn’t entirely alone.

She pushed open the little door. In the kitchenette, Mom flipped pancakes on the stovetop.

Rex, beside her, supervised. “It’s bubbling. Flip it, flip it, flip it.”

“Relax, buddy.” Mom slid the spatula beneath the pancake and turned it over. It sizzled when it hit the pan. “Detters,” Mom said. “Get the syrup out of the fridge, will you, and heat some up in the microwave.”

“Why can’t Rex do it?”

“It’s sticky,” Rex said, rolling up on the balls of his feet.

“I don’t even want pancakes.”

“Just get the syrup out, okay?”

Odette wanted to say no, it was not okay. No, she would not get the syrup. No, no, no.

But instead, she got the syrup. Even though it was completely unfair.