Page 51 of You've Got Hate Mail
“I don’t actually know what a honey puff pancake is.”
“Then let’s go find out.”
I join her on the steps, and she gives me a side hug. She smells like roses and baby powder, and she feels like security and strength.
“It’s good to see you,” she says. “We’ve been worried.”
Heat builds in my sinuses and my eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry, I?—”
“No sorries here. That’s my way of telling you we care, not my way of trying to make you feel guilty.”
She opens the door for me, and the first thing I see when I walk in is Ginny.
On crutches.
I cringe, but she smiles even brighter than Lavender did a few minutes ago. “Cricket! You’re here!” She switches directions to swing herself into the foyer, then props both crutches under one arm so she can hug me with the other. “Your hair smells amazing. How’re you feeling? Join us for breakfast. Elizabeth got an email from the drag queen whose show she interrupted, and it’s honestly the most healing thing I’ve ever heard in mylife. And also hilarious. Youhaveto hear it. Dori’s gearing up for a dramatic interpretation.”
I blink back tears, but I can’t blink back a sniffle.
Mabel strolls by with Lavender, but she pauses to hand me a tissue that she plucks out of a box on the side table in the foyer. “Glad you made it to the other side,” she says.
“Who maimed a side of fries?” Aunt Pip asks.
She’s letting the girls hang out, though she’s wearing pants today.
Sheer genie pants that clearly show the hot pink thong beneath, but still pants.
“Made itto theother side,” Mabel repeats. “Come on. Breakfast time.”
“Pfft,” Aunt Pip says while we all head toward the kitchen. “You act like she set a record. No one’severtouching Temperance for how long she squirreled up. That girl didn’t leave her bedroom for seventeen days.”
“Seventeen days?” And I thought I was being ridiculous. “How did she go viral?”
“Stomach issues,” Ginny says.
“On an office call with those stupid video meetings,” Aunt Pip says. “She was sitting in the bathroom on a meeting and everyone could hear her?—”
“Maybe after breakfast, Aunt Pip?” Mabel says.
“I get the idea,” I say.
Actually, I think I remember this.
If not Temperance, then someone else who did something similar.
“She didn’t stay long after she finally left her cave,” Aunt Pip says to me.
“She got a high-paying job as the spokesperson for a sanitation department in a major metropolitan area,” Ginny tells me. She points to Temperance’s picture on the wall, in a sectionlabeledtop-tier goddess level. “Spent seventeen days locked in her bedroom, opening it to take food and pass dirty plates out, then came out for two days to just sit on the porch, and announced on the third day that she was ready to go back.”
“Wow.”
“She’s my hero,” Olivia says, which makes everyone laugh.
“Reason she’s goddess level,” Mabel replies.
We all step into the kitchen—the scene of my last crime—and find Samantha and Dori there. They’re not related as far as I know, but they have similar builds and they’re each wearing sweatpants and eighties band T-shirts despite the thirty years between them. Dori’s shoulder-length purple hair is tied up in a loose bun, and Samantha’s shorter hair is sticking up in green spikes. They’re setting cast-iron skillets of a fluffy yellow cake-like thing with wide cracks and spotted brown crusts on the table.
“Morning, Cricket,” Samantha says with a smile. “Are you a fig jam kind of person? Or do you take your honey puff pancakes plain?”
