Page 40 of You've Got Hate Mail
I heard it over and over again as a kid.
Not theyou wouldn’t be such a disasterpart, but theyou should be more like your perfect, overachieving sisterspart.
I’m not perfect.
Not like my sisters.
Not like my parents want me to be.
And now I’ve hurt Ginny.
“I—I’m sorry,” I sob as I back up out of the mess. “I—I’ll clean it up.”
“I’ve got it, hon,” Samantha says softly behind me.
“They—they just fell. I didn’t even drop the carton. They fell out of the bottom.”
“Need to get that compressor checked again,” Olivia, the tallest of all of us with kind brown eyes but a no-nonsense attitude, murmurs to Mabel.
Samantha wades through the mess and slips an arm around me in a side hug that I don’t deserve, her green hair spikier than it was when we met. “Come with me, hon. We’ll get you some tea and some clean clothes. I can wash your hair in the sink if you’d like me to. Used to do it for my nieces all the time.”
“Ginny?” I whisper.
“It’s not your fault, Cricket,” she says. “Just irritated an old injury. I’ll be fine.”
“Oh my god, your teeth?”
“No. No, basketball injury from a time I tried to keep up with my brother.”
“Your ankle again?” Heath says.
“Just tweaked,” she assures him. “A day off of it, and it’ll be fine. Otherwise, I was just startled.”
“I’ll get the fridge checked,” Mabel says.
“Who’s having a bridge deck, and why are we playing cards this early in the morning?” Pip asks as she joins us in the kitchen.
Elizabeth, a sixty-ish lady with pink tips to her platinum hair who went viral for crashing a drag show next door to her daughter’s wedding, and Dori, the twenty-something who’s still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life after a messy viral breakup, are both in the hallway too.
Everyone’s here.
All we need is the cat, and they will have all witnessed my clumsiness.
All in their pajamas and robes, because not only have I made a disaster of the kitchen, I woke everyone in the house doing it.
“I’m not usually like this,” I babble to Samantha.
“We know, hon. We know.” She squeezes me tighter. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“We’ve got the kitchen, Cricket,” Mabel says.
Lavender’s stopped crying, but she’s still letting Mabel hold her like she’s not too big to be held anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I think—I think I should be alone right now.”
“Let me walk you,” Samantha says.
Because I’m a menace.
