Page 5 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
Chapter One
Bram
He’s awake,” a little voice whispers. “You ask him.”
“No, you ask him.”
“Let’s get Fern to ask him.”
Two pairs of tiny feet pound away, and I roll onto my back—into a wall of cardboard. A sheet falls onto my face, and I don’t even bother pulling it off because at least it’s stopping the sun from stabbing into my brain.
It is... so bright.
I breathe in through my nose and try to absorb as much information as possible without opening my eyes. I’m on a creaky wooden floor—mycreaky wooden floor. I’m still wearing my belt and shoes. My head hurts, my mouth is dry, and my dick is sore. Sore like it hasn’t been since I was eighteen.
A flash of last night comes to me—stripping off a condom and having to use a spare tucked inside the brat’s purse. And then having to use another.
Three times.Jesus. I haven’t gone three times in one night in... years.
“Dad,” comes the unhappy voice of a teenager. The sheet is ripped off my face and I force myself to blink my eyes open. My eyelids scrape over my corneas like fine-grain sandpaper.
“Yes?” I croak, and then try to sit up (a mistake). I knock over another wall of the cardboard fort that the twins have been building around me, pain lances through both the frontal and occipital bones of my skull, and then I have to confront the quiet judgment of my oldest daughter.
It occurs to me that I am too young to have a seventeen-year-old evaluating my fully legal bad decisions. (Thank you, Kansas sex education in the 2000s.)
“What time is it?” I rasp.
Fern stares down at me with her mother’s dark, dark eyes. Her expression doesn’t change, but it’s very clear that she has thoughts about her dad having slept fully clothed on the floor. “Nine in the morning. The twins have been up forhours.”
“And haveyoubeen awake for hours?” I ask as I glance around the living room and attached parlor. Old textbooks and battered dictionaries pin sheets to tables—sheets that are definitely supposed to be on beds upstairs—and the crushed exoskeletons of juice boxes litter random counters and chairs. The tinny noises of a YouTuber’s video game commentary emit from a place in the fort both mysterious and abandoned, and when I look over at the antique aquarium where the pet frog lives, I see the glass lid hinged open. No frog inside.
“Well, I just got up,” Fern concedes. “But they wokemeup to wakeyouup to tell you that they want pancakes.”
I catch movement just beyond the parlor, where the staircase is. Two heads of dark curls, bent together in either espionage or suspended conference.
“Is that true?” I ask the twins. “You two want pancakes?”
The twins step out of the shadows. They’re wearing a motley sampling of the makeup that Sara’s mother bought them for Christmas paired with superhero costumes, and they clunk over to me in some high heels they stole from Fern’s room. Letty—the spokeswoman of the pair—clears her throat as Berry, my shy one, crawls into my lap. She smells like apple juice and sunshine.
I kiss her soft glossy hair as Letty itemizes, in order of priority, the toppings they would like, starting with whipped cream, all the way down to sliced bananas.
AN HOUR LATER,and I’m Advil’ed, showered, and gathering syrupy plates from the kitchen island as the twins dash out to the backyard to enjoy their last day of non-school sunshine. I put the plates in the dishwasher, look around the ground floor of the rambling old house that Sara and I bought as a foreclosure, and allow myself a tired sigh. We picked the Queen Anne because 1) we had no money and it was cheap and 2) it looked like the kind of house that would forgive a mess or two. Sara and I have always been the kind of people to favor homey clutter over sterile minimalism, and the Queen Anne, with its fussy fireplaces and stained-glass windows and ornate metal doorknobs, practically came pre-cluttered.
But it’s too cluttered even for this old place, and I resign myself to spending the afternoon cleaning (and gently herding the twins into cleaning with me). We can leave part of the fort up in the parlor, maybe, because I do like to encourage their imagination and ability to problem-solve structural engineering dilemmas, but we’ll never find the frog if thewholefloor is covered in sheets and couch cushions, and we need to find the frog before I collect Hester Prynne from the vet—
“DAD!” Fern rushes into the kitchen. Her bronze cheeks are flushed with panic and the August sun. “My car won’t start!”
“Okay,” I say, setting the dishwasher and closing the door. “I’ll come take a look.”
“I’m supposed to meet Sophia at the library to make back-to-school posters,” adds Fern. “It’s really important, because Olivia has already flaked and Emily can’t help because she broke her pinkie finger playing lacrosse.”
“Well, when are you supposed to meet Sophia? I can get the twins gathered up and then drop you off—”
“I was supposed to meet her fifteen minutes ago,” Fern mourns, already going to the back door. “I’ll just walk.”
“Fern,” I call calmly, “it’s no problem for me to drive you. I just need to round up the twins—”
“No time!”
