Page 37 of You've Got Hate Mail
She disappeared into an office through a different door off the kitchen that she says is a repurposed butler’s pantry to catch up on email that she missed yesterday while she was helping watch Lavender. She does contract marketing work for smallcompanies, and I think that means she spends time on social media as well as email.
That’ll still take me a while. And given my degree and all of my experience is in journalism and content creation, finding a new job that doesn’t involve the internet will likely be impossible.
But I can’t be jobless forever. And surely there are some offline options that I can find.
“Measuring cups are in the corner cabinet to the right of the sink,” Ginny calls back. “Measuring spoons in the drawer by the fridge. Keep talking. I want to know how the good dragons made it out alive.”
I can make a few guesses how she knew what I wanted to ask without saying it in front of Lavender, but however she got there, I’m glad to know I’m not crossing lines.
She’d tell me if I was, wouldn’t she?
Or am I being set up?—
Stop it, Cricket.
I move across the kitchen to get the measuring cups. “The good dragons found a grumpy old dragon-slayer?—”
“Was it a girl or a boy?”
“A girl. She was grumpy because she fought better than the boys, but the boys always took credit for—” Shit. I probably shouldn’t poison her brain against boys just yet.
Especially with her being raised by a single dad.
“Boysalwaysdo that,” Lavender announces.
“Tell it like it is, Lav,” Ginny calls.
“Except my daddy. He only takes credit when he replaces toilets and helps naked ladies in the shower.”
There’s a choking noise from the office. “So many naked ladies in the shower, Lav?”
“No, just Cricket. My daddy doesn’t know any other ladies.”
“Am I a lady?” Ginny asks.
“No.”
“What makes a lady?” I ask Lavender.
“They have hairs on their vaginas.”
If Lav were five years older, I’d think she was trolling me.
“So the dragon slayer, Cricket?” Ginny says.
I fumble through opening three wrong drawers before I find the measuring spoons exactly where Ginny told me they’d be.
It happened, accept it, move on, I order myself.
“The dragon slayer wanted to kill the dragons at first, because she assumed all dragons were bad dragons,” I say, my voice getting stronger as I get back into the story, “but when the good dragons showed her their scars from where the bad dragons hurt them, and then the way they could blow fire so softly that it could light only a candle and not set the whole house on fire, she understood. Do you know how to measure flour and sugar?”
“What did the dragon slayer do?” Lav asks.
I measure the dry ingredients myself, tossing them into the mixing bowl. “She went out and found all of the other lady dragon slayers who’d been rejected from the dragon slayer army, and they teamed up with the good dragons to defeat the bad dragons and save the whole entire universe.”
“Wow,” Lavender whispers.
No meowing.
