Page 69 of Someone Like Me
Think about her? Sure. Speak her name aloud in the dark echoing of my apartment? That too. Hold myself back from going to see her? Every damn day.
Her sister Tori may be the wicked witch of the Saint Streets, but we are of one mind when it comes to Evie. She doesn’t need to be anywhere around me.
It doesn’t matter at all that I’m beginning to believe I might need her just so I can keep breathing.
“Errmmgg,”Annie says, her brow furrowed into an exaggerated frown.
I eye her with concern. “Excuse me?”
Her frown holds, and her voice comes out gruff and gravelly.“Me imitate you, Grumpy,”she says, sounding like a bad imitation of an oldTarzanmovie.“No words. Just grunts and growls.”
I stare at her, prison-grade stoic face locked and loaded. “You look like you’re shitting your pants.”
Startled laughter decimates her frown. Watching my kid sister laugh chips away at the mask. I give a grudging smile. She points at it.
“There. That’s better.” We reach her car, and she holds up the keys. “Wanna drive?”
I freeze. I hadn’t expected her to offer. At Angola, every once in a while, I would need to test-drive a prison vehicle to check the alignment or listen for a timing misfire, but that meant driving maybe a quarter mile around the auto shop. My heart pumps faster at the thought of the open road.
“You sure?”
Annie looks at me like I’m crazy. “What? You think I’m a chauffeur? Drive you all the way out here to get your license so you can ride shotgun all the way back?”
“Alright, sassy,” I say, giving her a fake glare and opening my palm. “Gimme the keys.”
And driving might as well be flying. The power to choose the path in front of me, to rev, to slow, to tune the damn radio is as sweet as honey. My time at Angola seems to slip a little further into the past as my hands rest easy on the steering wheel.
Who knew?
Annie must sense my absorption in the experience because, for once in her life, she doesn’t chatter for a whole ten minutes. But we’re just past Maurice, listening to Atlas Genius when she drops a bomb.
“Grandma says you have a girlfriend.”
“I do not.” The denial fires off like a bullet. I feel Annie’s eyes on me, but I keep mine on the road.
“Aunt Josie says so too.”
I groan. Do all the women in my family have the meddling gene? “They’re both wrong.”
“Anyone I know?”
I speak through gritted teeth. “I do not have a girlfriend.”
She’s undeterred. “Then who’s the girl in question because, I mean, there’s obviously a girl,” she reasons. “And whether or not she’s your friend or your girlfriend, there’s a story.”
“No girlfriend. No story.”
“Oh,come on,Drew.”
I give her the side eye and see she’s wearing a look of impatience.
“I’m not buying the no-story story. Spill.”
I don’t want to concede and prove her right. But the urge to talk about Evie, to visit her in words, to bring her to life in my mind again is sudden and potent.
“Do you know the people who live behind Grandma?”
Annie gasps. “It’s Evie!”
