I think we’ve seen the movie twenty times. I’m not sure why our parents let us watch it so young. It’s a bit twisted, but I suppose that must be part of the allure. To be honest, I’m more interested in the real-life drama between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. I try to picture them in modern day, maybe on Bravo trying to ride out the last potentials of their dying careers.
“You hungry?” I ask Alexa as the credits roll.
“Not really.”
“Well, I’m going down to the bodega to get something then.”
“Okay.”
I grab my wallet and head downstairs. It’s brighter than I expect it to be. And louder. The bodega on the corner has great bacon, egg, and cheese bagels. I walk up the two tiny steps and push my body against the door, only to be met with extreme resistance. I step back and see a yellow lined piece of paper with the words WILL RETURN IN 20 MINUTES scribbled in all caps in the middle. Fuck.
I settle on a slice of pizza. There are a few places around here. Alexa loves Joe’s, but I want Bleecker Street. It’s a couple blocks away but worth it, and I grab the pizza to go on a paper plate. After enjoying my cheese slice, I decide to cut through the alley as a shortcut. I shove the last piece of crust in my mouth and drop the plate on the ground, but I can hear Alexa’s voice yelling “don’t litter” in my brain.
I bend down to grab the trash but nearly lose the pizza I just ate as I see what the plate has landed on. It takes me a moment to make sense of what I’m looking at, but these eyes are staring right at me over a mouth agape in horror. It’s the head of a small bird, and there’s no way it just came off like that on its own. Gross. This city is so fucked up. I drop the plate into the nearest trash bin and shake off the sketchy dead bird.
I’m climbing the stairs when I suddenly realize that Alexa just let me off the hook pretty easily given that I told an entire salon to fuck off. She didn’t lecture me or tell me to order in. She let me go back out—risking that I would embarrass her again—without any pause or fight.
What’s she up to? I wonder.
Alexa may be the weaker of us, but she doesn’t back down from every fight that easily. Especially ones that stem from me embarrassing her.
We’ve never kept much from each other, which makes it all the more obvious when there’s something she’s keeping from me. I don’t remember how old we were, but it was one of our last beach days before the incident. I remember being at the beach, sitting in the warm sand. We were working diligently on a sandcastle, the kind where you dripped the wet grains into formation, ending up with something more like Gaudí than Michelangelo. Messy but still masterful.
“I want to go catch sand crabs,” Alexa announced, stopping work on her tower of the castle abruptly and pulling me up with her to move closer to the incoming tide.
“I’m not done,” I declared and dragged her back down. “I want to finish my castle.”
“No,” she retorted, pulling me toward the tide again. “Can’t we just catch a few and then finish your dumb castle?”
“Be nice, you two,” Mom called to us from the deeper sand farther up the beach. She was situated under a yellow-and-white umbrella in one of those folding chairs, a cooler to her left housing all of our snacks. Dad was sitting in a similar chair with his head tilted back. I couldn’t hear him from where I sat in the sand, but I knew he was snoring.
“Five minutes, then we’re going back to the castle,” I told Alexa.
She turned and looked at me, a tiny little crab wiggling around in the wet sand in the palm of her small hand. I could tell she wanted to say something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What?”
“You look like you’re about to say something,” I told her. “Something that probably isn’t that nice.”
She knelt down and dropped the crab. He skittered away, quickly disappearing below the wet sand. Little bubbles peppered the sand all around, and I knew that this meant the crab and his friends were burrowing farther down and awaiting the next wave.
“What is it?” I asked again.
“It’s nothing,” she huffed. “Let’s go finish the castle.”
I followed her back to our warm, sandy seats and happily resumed my work on the tower. She was pretty quiet for the rest of the day, and I remember not really caring what it was but knowing that she had kept something from me for the first time. We were young, so I didn’t think much of it until the incident. Then I was pretty sure what the look meant that day on the beach.
I’m not sure what she’s hiding now, only that she is hiding something. She only lets me get my way that easily when she’s preparing for something bigger down the line. This makes my skin prickle a little.
What do you have in store, Lex?