Oh. My . . .”
Shanna’s voice was coated in delicious scandal. So much so that Daisy couldn’t help turning her head. Years in Los Angeles traffic had beaten the rubbernecking instinct out of her, but suburban New England must have made her rusty, because she immediately looked.
And saw what could only be described as the preschool equivalent of a Maserati spinning out on the 101 Freeway.
“Is that . . .”
Shanna nodded, her eyes wide.
Quinn Barrett, the president of the Parent Association, and having-it-all motherhood motivation poster, was having the mother of all meltdowns.
Daisy and Shanna were sitting on a little rise by the rotting “historic” barn. Shanna had said it was the best spot to watch the parade, although now Daisy wished she had insisted on the front row. She’d wanted to get good footage of Carrie in her costume. Rob was rushing from work—she could see him in the tracking app she had on her phone, willing him to magic his way past all the horrible Massachusetts drivers (apparently in Massachusetts drivers’ ed they taught signaling was optional).
Carrie couldn’t be more thrilled to be in the parade. Her daughter was a round little bullet train, ready to barrel through anything with a big smile and a type of joy that, previous to parenthood, Daisy didn’t know existed. The first day she had come to the Needleton Academy for Potential Prodigies and Little Wonders, she had walked up to three kids in the Tadpole Room, said, “Hi! I’m Carrie. I like Star Wars and dragons. You’re my friend now.”
And all three of those kids complied. Falling in behind Carrie and playing castles and dragons and Jedi knights while Daisy watched, completely astonished.
She’d planned to stick around, to ease Carrie into her first school experience. But her kid was more ready for school than Daisy was.
“She’ll be fine,” Miss Rosie had said, patting Daisy’s shoulder as Carrie practically pushed her away. Daisy quickly found herself sitting in the Little Wonders parking lot, heaving loud sobs.
And now, at the Halloween parade, she found herself pushed to the back again, but this time it was against the crappy old historic barn that only housed vermin and the school’s chicken coop. Shanna had settled into a folding chair next to Daisy’s, but almost as soon as her Lululemon-covered butt hit the chair, she jumped up again.
“Oh! There’s Cass and Rebecca! They’re Charlie and Calvin’s moms. I have to go ask them something about the next Parent Association meeting. Hold our seats, okay?”
And just like that, Shanna had danced across the yard toward two women whose smiles could not mask the bone-deep tiredness of having twin boys.
Daisy pulled at the sleeves of her cardigan—since the move she had been the recipient of a half dozen cardigans, pea coats, and puffy jackets, mostly from Robbie’s well-meaning family. Everyone thought that as a transplant from LA, she’d be ill-equipped for a New England winter. But the sun was fighting its way through the clouds—and she missed the sun. The cardigan felt lumpy and unnecessary. So she shed it.
Daisy had beautiful arms. It was one of her favorite features. Perfect, strong shoulders, tapered wrists, muscles born of carrying her daughter around for the last three years. (The rest of her body had turned into Play-Doh, but her arms were in amazing shape.) Her tattoo artist loved them—she’d cried when she finished Daisy’s sleeves, because she couldn’t work on such great arms anymore.
It felt good to let her best side out, for once.
She’d sat in the sun for some minutes, letting the mass confusion of a preschool event wash over her. She scanned the crowd for Shanna. There she was, now talking to . . . oh god, which dad was that? He was setting up a sound system and doing it wrong.
Daisy was half a step from leaving their chairs to go tell him how to fix it. She knew her way around AV cables. But then she stopped. Shanna wanted her to save these seats.
Normally, she would have marched over and cheerfully offered her assistance. But she was still learning the landscape. Of Little Wonders. Of Needleton. Hell, of the entire northeastern quadrant of the United States. So, she stayed where she was.
Suddenly, there had been a commotion. The parade was starting up. A tiny little Captain America was peeking out of the doors of the school.
And everyone’s phones went up, at the ready.
Daisy raised hers, too.
And on days when her daughter was dressed in her handmade General Leia Organa costume, complete with headband ear buns, she was glad she had the convenient phone instead of the bulky equipment she’d used for work in her previous life.
As she raised the phone to eye level, turned on the camera app, and zoomed the camera in (gah, they were stupidly far away from the parade route), Shanna had approached from the crowd.
But Shanna hadn’t been looking at her.
Shanna had been looking beyond her.
“Oh. My . . .”
And that’s when it happened. Daisy whipped her head around.
She also whipped her camera phone around.
“Is that . . . ,” she said in the barest whisper. Her phone auto-focused on Quinn Barrett, who stood around the corner of the ancient vermin shed, looking like she might murder the small child in the fireman’s helmet she was standing in front of.
Then, they watched as Quinn picked up a (surprisingly cool and well-constructed) chrome-painted spaceship and tossed it to the ground. Then she had an epic rage-out, punctuating each of her words with a stomp on the poor silver cardboard.
“. . . And if you”—STOMP—“Don’t want it”—STOMP—“You don’t get to have it!”
Daisy cringed at every word. But she couldn’t tear her eyes or her phone away.
And when Quinn Barrett’s foot got caught, and she windmilled to keep her balance—well . . . it was really, really hard not to laugh.
Daisy wasn’t the only one who found it funny, because she heard Shanna, behind her, snort into her hand.
When the wailing cry of “MY SPAAAAAAAACEEEEEESHIIIIP!!!!!” went up, Shanna pulled Daisy back around the corner, hiding them from view.
“She’s looking over,” Shanna whispered. “Act cool, act cool.”
Daisy hadn’t been told to act cool since she was under the bleachers vomiting up the cafeteria lunch after one hit from her high school friend’s itty-bitty joint, but she did as she was told, holding silent as a church mouse until Shanna moved, peeking her head back around the side of the historic house.
“They’re gone.” Shanna exhaled. “Ohmigod, did you get it?”
“Get it?” Daisy said, bewildered.
“On your phone. Did you record that?”
“Oh! Um . . .” Daisy looked down at her hand. Yes, her phone had been up. And yes, she had hit Record. So, yes, the thirty-five seconds of pure parental freak-out from one of the most uptight people she’d ever seen had been recorded for all posterity on her phone.
“Ohmigod, you have to email that to me,” Shanna said, juicy delight in her eyes. “Not for, like, public consumption, but I have to show Jamie, he wouldn’t believe it.”
Daisy hid the phone behind her back. “Actually, I hadn’t pressed Record yet, sorry.” For some reason she didn’t trust Shanna with something so damning. Daisy didn’t have any love for Quinn Barrett—hell, she didn’t even know Quinn Barrett beyond the fact that she was scary and made Daisy feel like a naive kid for having the audacity to move chairs without having signed up to do so—but giving it to Shanna seemed . . . cruel somehow.
Even though Shanna was her cousin-in-law. And friend.
A shiver ran up Daisy’s spine.
“You cold?” Shanna asked, bending down. “Here, put on your sweater. New England weather will sneak up on you.”
Daisy felt Shanna’s eyes on her tattoos as she took the sweater from her. Everyone always stared. Usually they were her favorite conversation starter. But here, in Needleton, no one seemed to want to have that conversation.
But the sun had gone behind some big puffy fall clouds. She was legit chilly.
“Look, there’s Rob and Jamie!” Shanna said, waving to the two men who looked more like twin brothers than cousins and who were waist deep in children as they cut across the parade route.
Seeing Rob in his work uniform of Red Sox hat, chambray shirt, and workman’s pants sent a little zing through her heart. His eyes met hers, and he grinned wide, sending the zing shooting all over.
And just like that, the video, the incident, was all but forgotten.
“Come on,” Shanna said, taking Daisy’s hand, “let’s move up toward the front. I can’t see anything of the parade from back here.”
* * *
That night, Daisy emerged from Carrie’s room, stepping down into the basement of Rob’s grandfather’s house, where she found Rob snoring softly on the ancient plaid pull-out couch.
It had been less than a month that they had been crashing at Rob’s grandpa’s house, but damned if that couch didn’t envelop Rob’s body like an ex-lover. If it wasn’t an inanimate object, Daisy might be jealous.
She smiled and lightly shook his foot, causing him to wake up with a jolt and a snort.
“Jesus!” he said, pressing his hand to his heart. “I thought it was an earthquake.”
“Nope, sorry,” Daisy replied. “This side of the country is quake free.”
“Just another bonus of moving.” Rob sat up and placed a kiss on Daisy’s temple as she slid into the seat next to him.
“She go down?” he asked.
“Eventually,” Daisy replied.
“I thought the parade and dance party would have taken it out of her . . . ,” Rob replied.
“Not our girl—she feeds off other people’s energy like a vampire.”
They had come back from the Halloween parade and dance party in high spirits. Carrie had lead-jockeyed her way to the front of the line of the Tadpole Room and marched the parade route like a majorette with an invisible baton. (Thank God Princess Leia never wielded a light saber, else more than one person would have lost an eye.)
Then had come the dance party in their little auditorium. In which Carrie Organa Stone had taken the floor and did not leave it for two hours, only pausing to refuel on juice boxes and non-GMO popcorn. Rob had been her favorite dance partner and demanded that he do the Dirty Dancing lift (she had seen the ending dance sequence of that movie on YouTube, and it had quickly became an obsession), which set off a chain reaction of other little girls—and most of the boys—demanding their parents do the Dirty Dancing lift. Someone even managed to queue up the song.
Rob’s cousin Jamie had jokingly said that he would send Rob his chiropractor bills.
Shanna chimed in, saying she would send along Jordan’s plastic surgeon bills if Jordan got hurt.
Daisy didn’t think she was joking.
Daisy and Rob fully expected Carrie to fall asleep in the car. Instead, Carrie brought the party home with her.
“Monster-mash dance!” Carrie had run around the tiny living room yelling. So they monster-mashed through the evening. Which was supposed to exhaust her, but instead Carrie was too keyed up for bed, so Daisy had to lie next to her daughter scrunched onto the “big girl” twin bed until she was 100 percent asleep.
When they’d moved east, they left the cribs and the baby gates behind, and let her sleep in the twin bed in Rob’s grandpa’s guest room. Which meant that if she wasn’t 100 percent asleep when Daisy left the room, there was no obstacle to Carrie climbing out of her big girl bed to seek out her parents in their slim few hours of personal time, and then there was no alternative but to restart bedtime from the beginning.
“Today was great, wasn’t it?” Rob said, stifling a yawn and giving her a grin. “Picture-perfect Halloween parade. Complete with crunchy leaves and a cool breeze. And not ninety-five degrees in October.”
“Yeah,” Daisy said, trying for the enthusiasm she didn’t feel.
“I don’t suppose you’d wanna do some monster-mashing with me,” Rob said, leaning against her shoulder, giving her ear a kiss.
Daisy raised an eyebrow. “You can’t even stand.”
“I don’t need to stand, that’s the beauty of it.”
Daisy’s mind ran through all the stuff she had to do. Clean out the lunch box, clean the kitchen, run the dishwasher, get a head start on the laundry, email Carrie’s pediatrician about that weird rash on her ankle (probably poison ivy since it grew in the woods behind the house, Rob said), make sure Carrie’s soccer clothes were ready for tomorrow’s practice, prep for trick or treaters, and search through a thousand listings online for a place for them to live that they could conceivably afford.
They couldn’t stay in Rob’s grandfather’s basement forever.
Not to mention figure out how to build her career in a place three thousand miles away from her comfort zone.
But, she thought, as Rob slid a finger up her arm and then underneath her bra strap, letting it fall to the side, it was Friday night.
The lunch box and stuff could certainly wait until tomorrow morning.
HALF AN HOUR later, Rob was blissfully asleep, in that postcoital coma that he stereotypically excelled at. How he managed such boyish abandon after having sex in his grandfather’s basement, Daisy did not know. He must have just simply felt at home.
Daisy stretched her neck, rubbed her eyes. She could have joined him in sleep. The fold-out couch was surprisingly comfortable, sunk into compliance by decades of use. And her body was certainly tired—completely wrung out by the day, week, month that she’d endured. But her mind would not quiet.
She had been so nervous about today. Not about Carrie having a good time—Carrie was her sweet, happy, interested girl who found a way to make almost anything fun. It could have thunderstormed and Carrie would have still had the time of her short life.
No—she had been nervous about herself.
This was something she would never admit to Rob. He thought the move from Los Angeles had been as smooth as cream cheese. He loved his new job. He loved being in Needleton, near his family. He even loved the freaking fall, from the foliage to the genuine need for knit scarves.
So what if Daisy felt like she was drowning in a sea of uncertainty every time she stepped out of this house?
Daisy didn’t fit in—which, honestly, wasn’t new. She had never even fit in with her own family back in Houston.
Her sister was a cheerleader. Her mother a penny-pinching homemaker. Her brother led their school to the state soccer semifinals. And Daisy . . .
She was the proverbial bespeckled nerd. She gravitated to the library, to comic books, to the tech crew of the theater department . . . and to the movie theater.
She loved movies. She lost herself in them, going to the theater two, three, four times in a row on weekends. She loved sci-fi best, and when, at eight years old, she’d heard that first blare of a trumpet in the Star Wars opening sequence, she fell madly, truly, and deeply in love.
Daisy did well in school itself. So, there was no question about going to college, not when it was the only thing her parents thought about, scrimping and saving so their kids would have better lives than they did. But Daisy didn’t choose the nice, safe, state university her sister and brother had. She got a partial scholarship to USC and never looked back.
At first, Daisy thought Los Angeles was going to be basically the same as Houston: pretty people made of money, everyone trying to be—or at least befriend—a Kardashian. And there were those people. But Daisy also discovered a much larger side of the city—this wonderful, weird part of Los Angeles that reveled in nerdiness, celebrated your passions, and delighted in being different.
People who loved Funko pop figurines and then got to design them.
People who wrote twisted dark plays about humanity’s grunginess and then Hallmark movies about a pair of rivals who fall in love at a harvest festival, with equal eagerness and delight.
People who spent their high school days doodling Wolverine in notebooks, and now drew X-Men comics for a living.
In LA, she found her tribe.
She dyed her dark brown hair—first time she went red, dipping her toes into the world of self-alteration, but quickly moved beyond natural shades to pink, aqua, and her favorite electric blue.
Her mom nearly had a heart attack when she came home for Thanksgiving.
She got her first tattoo. A Rebel Alliance symbol.
She finally took an interest in makeup—not because she wanted to “put her best face forward,” as her mother had always called it, but because she’d started dabbling in cosplay.
She went back to Houston for her sister’s very Houston wedding and came to the realization that Los Angeles was home.
In college, she played her first D&D game. By the time she graduated, she was Dungeon Master of her own game, which fired her imagination, played up her organizational skills, and catered to her love of masterminding from behind the scenes—thank you, high school tech crew. She combed through the 5e sourcebooks the second they were released like it was a lost tablet from Mount Sinai, containing all the secrets to running the world.
She’d even tinkered with writing her own Star Wars–based homebrew setting. Unlicensed, of course, but oh, so much fun living in that world!
And that was how she’d met Rob.
She’d been working in Los Angeles for a couple of years by then, having graduated from college and worked in TV production, going from job to job as a set PA, with a walkie-talkie on her hip and starry-eyed ambition. And as she did this, she met more and more people, some of whom played D&D. And everyone wanted a good Dungeon Master—someone to script and guide them through a game.
So, she started DMing campaigns on the side—mostly for fun, although sometimes she got paid. It was at one of these games that she’d met Rob. Among the players of her recent game was a newbie—a D&D virgin with a crooked smile and a Red Sox baseball cap who took one look at Daisy and claimed the seat next to hers. To “learn better,” or so Rob had claimed at the time. Later he admitted to his nefarious scheme of trying to get her to laugh at his jokes.
Which she did.
Rob was funny. And sweet. And fun. A classic chaotic good, excited to take on the world. He’d come out to LA after college, like so many do, planning on being the next Steven Spielberg. Sure, he was working at a commercial production company at that moment, shooting close-ups of juicy chicken for Olive Garden commercials—but it was all a stepping stone, right?
They fell in love hard and fast. Rob had never been with anyone like Daisy, and vice versa. To Rob, Daisy was just so bright, so passionate, so interested in everything. And to Daisy, Rob was just so steady, so practical, so easy to be around. She just wanted to be around him all the time.
Their wedding was festive and silly, and she marched down the aisle to the Throne Room music from Star Wars. Both their families seemed perplexed, but his family seemed happy that he was happy with her, and when her mother had a drink or three too many, she confessed that she was just happy that Daisy ended up with a man. Because apparently Daisy’s disdain for high school football players and her one camping trip to Joshua Tree had cemented her lesbianship in her parents’ minds.
They settled into a little apartment and intended to work their way into the center of the Hollywood industrial complex. Rob got another stepping-stone job at an event company. Daisy freelanced her heart out.
But then Daisy got pregnant.
It wasn’t planned. But they were both extremely happy. Rob’s father had passed when he was still in college, so he was ecstatic to build a family. They’d spent weeks playing around with names, but as soon as they learned it was a girl, Daisy knew she was naming her daughter after Carrie Fisher. (The fact that the star of the new Star Wars franchise was a Daisy just made everything feel full circle.)
But as Daisy’s work was all freelance, Rob’s stepping stone of a job became their steady source of income and health insurance. Providing for those practicalities got in the way of Rob’s ambition, no matter how many times Daisy told Rob she wanted him to do work that made him happy.
He always replied that Daisy and Carrie made him happy.
But she knew he needed more. She knew that the longer he stayed at the event-coordinating job, setting up parties and press for other people’s stories instead of pursuing his own dreams, Rob was getting more cynical. More unhappy.
And more and more, he talked about where he grew up. Needleton, Massachusetts. He told her the history of the town—how it had been founded around an ironworks that had ended up becoming known for manufacturing needles. (Hence, Needleton.) How the old buildings—the mill, the smithy, the town hall—all still stood, and always would.
He told her his childhood had been idyllic—playing in the woods for hours on end; building forts with the neighborhood kids; sports, games, and having space enough to breathe. Nothing like the hot, heavy air in the Valley. Not like the microyards and the dust that settled over everything. And any ambitions he had then were in the future, just waiting to be picked out of the sky. He missed home. He missed what family he still had, he whispered late at night before he fell asleep.
It didn’t help his rose-colored hindsight that Daisy had been looking for work for a while. When Carrie was born, Daisy found herself out of the freelance production business for a time. And it was increasingly difficult to slide back in. Money was tight, and she could still DM games—but those were hours and hours long, sometimes whole days, and not very much money. Certainly not enough to justify all the work she put into it.
Then the Scary Thing happened.
And Daisy had been knocked off her axis of where she felt safe, and at home.
So Rob started looking at jobs back east in earnest.
Daisy honestly didn’t know if Rob actually expected to get one.
Then, lightning struck.
An old contact worked freelance for a guy who sometimes helped out on a local Boston PBS show, The Antique Home.
This was Robbie’s favorite show. He’d watched since he was a kid, in his grandfather’s basement, on an ugly plaid couch thirty feet from his grandpa’s amateur woodworking setup. They were starting a spin-off series—The Brand New Home, where they would build a house from foundation to faucets—and needed a film crew.
Daisy had a friend with a connection to The Antique Home and told Daisy to submit her resumé.
And Daisy told Rob to submit his.
She didn’t mind, really, handing over the opportunity to him. Daisy had Carrie to think of. And it was Rob’s show. It was Rob’s dream. When you’re married, she knew, you sometimes had to put your partner’s happiness above your own.
And he got it.
“It was the best interview of my life, Daze,” Rob had said on the phone. “After my interview with the producers I got to meet Jo-Jo” (Jo-Jo was the carpenter on the program, the son of Joe Senior, who had been the original carpenter in the seventies), “and I showed him pictures of my latest guitar and he said it had to be me! I’m the new production manager for The Brand New Home!”
So . . . they did it. Rob came back, gave two weeks’ notice. Then, they packed up everything, said goodbye to their friends, and drove with little Carrie in their fifteen-year-old RAV4 across the country to Needleton, Massachusetts.
Daisy’s Los Angeles existence, the first place she’d truly felt at home, was left in the rearview mirror.
The idea was that they would give it a year. Just enough time to decide whether Rob was a good fit for the job, if Daisy was going to be able to find work, if Carrie was going to adjust, if they would find a place to live, if they would be happy. And if they weren’t . . .
But Daisy knew within two days, with a sinking heart, that they were staying.
The job was perfect. Rob was so happy, actually making a show he cared about. And since it was public television, it paid an absolute pittance.
So, here she was. Carrie sleeping upstairs, Grandpa Bob snoring so loudly she could hear him two floors away, and a husband passed out blissfully, Daisy scrolled through the Needleton housing market, replete with new construction McMansions with tray ceilings and three-car garages, the familiar wave of helplessness settling over her like a scratchy old blanket.
Needleton, for all its working-class needle-factory roots, had evolved into a town filled with doctors, lawyers, and moneymakers who wanted nothing more than the protective bubble of a bucolic existence for their families. And were willing to pay very, very well for it.
And of course Daisy wanted that same bubble to protect her daughter—but jeez, even Grandpa Bob’s hadn’t-been-touched-since-the-seventies two-bedroom would go for many more zeroes than they had in their bank account.
Looking at all the fancy marble countertop kitchens and upstairs-and-downstairs laundry rooms made Daisy just miss their little apartment in North Hollywood all the more. Miss her job(s). Miss her friends. Miss . . . just fitting in.
Daisy had an unconventional look, she knew that. She knew she had created who she wanted to be, what she wanted to look like, and it was a source of confidence to her.
At least . . . it was in LA.
In LA, she fit in.
In Boston—or at least parts of it—she undoubtedly fit in. Heck, in suburbs across the vast swath of the country, she would probably fit in without much second-glancing.
But in Needleton—AKA colonial Stepford—she very much did not fit in.
She thought back to the parade that day, the way people glanced at her arms, and the number of cardigans she’d received since coming here.
The chill didn’t come just from the weather. And it made her crave the LA sun all the more.
Just as she was feeling wistful enough to type “Los Angeles” into the real estate website’s search bar, a message window popped up on her computer.
Sarah Prime: Hey, girl! What are you doing up?
Daisy’s face spread into a wide grin. Sarah Prime was really Sarah Desantis—they had been friends since freshman year of college, on the same floor of the dorm. Over the course of the next several years, their circle of friends expanded to include several other Sarahs. But for Daisy, her first Sarah would always be Sarah Prime.
Darth Daisy: Me? What about you? Aren’t your players supposed to be saving their village from hordes of orcs right now?
Sarah Prime: Danny had to go out of town for work and Martin’s apartment is being fumigated for termites, so we decided to postpone the campaign until we could all be there.
Darth Daisy: Can’t do without a ranger and a cleric for one measly week?
Sarah Prime: We are facing a three-headed gleeok next, so we need all our rangers and clerics.
When Daisy had left Los Angeles, she had handed Sarah Prime the responsibility of Dungeon Mastering the end of their ongoing campaign. She was a little confused, as she hadn’t had a gleeok dragon—let alone a triple-headed one—in what she’d built. But it was Sarah’s campaign now. She can face off against however many dragons she wants, Daisy thought reluctantly.
Sarah Prime: Besides, it’s Halloween! I have a party or five to attend.
Daisy felt tired and sad at the same time. How she missed going to all those Halloween parties! And how utterly exhausting it sounded!
Sarah Prime: How’re the stiff upper lips of New England?
Daisy was about to give Sarah Prime the polite version of how she was feeling (oh, it’s very nice here, I miss you all so much, but Carrie loves it, we’re doing good) and she actually got halfway through typing it, but then . . . she stopped herself.
God, if she couldn’t confess how she was feeling to her friends, who could she talk to?
Darth Daisy: Well . . .
It all spilled out of her. The Halloween parade. Grandpa Bob’s basement. Missing Los Angeles at Halloween—especially at Halloween, she loved the way LA did Halloween! Crazy decorations, kids packed on the streets, costume stores every fifty feet. And basically just feeling like the world’s least impressive mom, behind the ball in everything, especially at Little Wonders.
By the time she got to the fact that Little Wonders had a Slack, Sarah Prime’s entire message block was just filled with emojis that were either laugh-crying or fuming with anger.
Darth Daisy: I swear to god I’ve never seen people this uptight and crazy in my life. Needleton moms are no joke.
Sarah Prime: And you used to work in Hollywood! Seriously—there’s no way they are more uptight than Vanessa.
Daisy and Sarah Prime’s good friend Allie was personal assistant to one Vanessa Faire, star of Fargone, which had been Daisy’s favorite sci-fi show until Allie started telling her all about Vanessa’s diva-ish behavior. A few seasons ago, Vanessa had notoriously lost her cool while filming the season finale, while press was visiting the set. Ever since then, Vanessa had gotten more uptight, and in Daisy’s opinion, the show had really gone downhill.
But Allie always had the most hysterical and exasperating stories about her boss. Hence, the barometer of crazy in their friend group was set by “Is this something Vanessa would do?”
Darth Daisy: Oh, I’ve witnessed things that can rival even Vanessa’s craziness.
Sarah Prime: No way. Pics or it didn’t happen.
Daisy snorted out a laugh. Sarah wanted pics? She had better than pics. She had video.
She went into the cloud and plucked the Halloween parade video out of her files. Then, she trimmed the edges—no one needed to see her bad camera work as she tried to capture the kids parading and the camera kept accidentally rack-focusing to Shanna or other parents. She set the start point at when Shanna said a juicy “Oh. My.” and the camera swung and found Quinn Barrett losing it on that poor misbegotten cardboard spaceship.
It was twenty seconds long, but that was all anyone needed to see.
Darth Daisy: Meet the head of the Parent Association at school.
Exactly thirty-seven seconds after she posted it, Sarah Prime responded.
Sarah Prime: OHMYGOD.
Then . . .
LOL!!!!! OMG that’s hysterical
Darth Daisy: Seriously! That poor kid. And that mom . . . she’s gotta live with the memory of doing that forever.
Sarah Prime: Are you kidding? Someone like that is just gonna take a Xanny with her cabernet and deny it ever happened. Hey, can I show this to Allie and Juliana? They will die.
There were no secrets in their tight little group, so Daisy didn’t even think twice.
Darth Daisy: Of course.
Sarah Prime: Oh my god, did Allie tell you all about V’s latest meltdown? Apparently, that asshole she’s dating, Sebastian, well, he’s got his kid for the weekend, and Vanessa loses it when the kid drops something on the rug—
As Sarah Prime began to download her on the latest secondhand madness of one particular rich and somewhat famous person, Daisy began to finally feel a little bit more like herself. As if they were sitting in Sarah Prime’s squashy living room in Santa Monica, two bottles of wine in on that rare girls’ night, unwinding with her friends. But then, Sarah Prime had a Halloween party to get ready for (though she said she’d wanted to talk to Daisy more than she wanted to party, which made her feel so warm and fuzzy and guilty) and quickly Daisy found herself alone again, in her husband’s grandfather’s basement, as everyone else in the house snored away. Content. Happy. Comfortable.
Everyone, except Daisy.
But now at least, she was bone tired enough to lie down next to Rob, let him throw a sleepy arm around her, warming her into sleep.