Page 4 of The Devil Wears Nada

"Okay, don't be weird about it," she says, arranging her napkin, "but I did an abundance meditation for you this morning. For the, you know, situation."

"The situation."

She lowers her voice. "I'm not going to say the L-word at the table; it's such a low-vibration⁠—"

"The loan, Birdie. It's a loan. It has my name on it, as well as yours. It's allowed to be said at the table."

She winces like I've raised my voice, which I have not. This is a thing Birdie does, somehow makes me, the one being a responsible grown-up, feel like the aggressive one for bringing stuff up.

“Anyway. Why were you so desperate to have lunch today, Bird?” I ask.

She shimmies in her chair. "Okay. So here's the thing." She leans in, eyes lighting up the way they always do right before one of her ideas costs me money. "Don't say no yet."

"No."

"You didn't even⁠—"

"Historically, 'don't say no yet' has cost me a shitload of money and a goat named Priscilla."

"Priscilla found a beautiful home." She says it with the wounded dignity of a woman defending her honor. "And this is completely different from the goat yoga ranch. I’m done with livestock. They are just too… unpredictable.”

“Okay. So what are you into now, Bird? Is your new focus wild animals? Are you trying to open a zoo? Be the next Joe Exotic?”

She rolls her eyes. “God, Ag, give me some credit. I’m not an idiot. And besides, didn’t that guy go to jail?”

I wait.

"It’s candles."

My fork pauses halfway to my mouth. “Candles? Like the kind made out of wax? With wicks and stuff?”

She nods excitedly. "Yes. I’m working on a candle line. Intention candles, the kind you set an intention with, and, Ag, the market is insane right now, people are starving for meaning in their lives⁠—"

"People are starving for their money back, Bird. Some of them from us."

I open my mouth to say the number then, the real number that we owe, the one that troubles my soul, the one I think about when I first wake in the morning and before I drift off to sleep. The one that lives in my gut, that doesn’t hesitate to remind me I fucked up big-time, letting my sister suck me into another stupid business venture when I don’t even like goats, yoga, or ranches.

The number that Birdie couldn’t give a shit about even though she got both of us into this mess.

But I don’t say it, the blasted amount of our debt, because saying it out loud makes it real, and I cannot deal with any more real at the moment.

Birdie, on the other hand, has mercifully moved on from worrying about anything. This is her genius, her superpower, her entire nervous system and I will envy it until the day I die. Nothing bothers her. Nothing worries her.

In fact, someone comes into Sprout holding a little puppy and she gasps, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh my God. Life is just a miracle, isn’t it?”

It’s a miracle I don’t strangle her.

"But anyway." She turns back to me, head tilted, like she really wants to hear what I have to say. For a second, the shine goes out of her eyes and some adult responsibility thing washes over her face. It’s brief, like it always is with her. "How are you affording the payments? On the loan? I mean, it’s a lot of money, Ag, and your desk job is probably not going to cut it."

And once again, my sister leaves me holding the bag, the one full of her shit.

For a second, I consider telling her about my new money-making venture. I can hear her crowing about how being a camgirl is a reclamation of feminine power, and follow up by offering to build me a vision board. But the entire plan here is that no one knows, and the first crack in "no one" is not going to be the sister who once gave our landlord my middle name and social security number because she "felt he should have it."

"Freelance," I say. "Data entry. Spreadsheets. Deeply boring."

"Spreadsheets," she repeats.

She has no idea what a spreadsheet is.