Page 50 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

Part Two

JEREMIAH + MERRIAM

Prologue

[ ] Nice

[ ] Naughty

[X] I tried

—T-shirt

JEREMIAH

“What can I do for you?” the helpful outdoor mall attendant asked.

I smiled and kept walking but said, “Just heading to the Angel Tree.”

I had no clue what I’d find today, but seeing the tree with so many children’s wishes wasn’t what I expected.

Usually, at this time of year, a lot of them had already been adopted.

Hell, I’d already picked up twenty-five Angel Tree kids myself utilizing my family’s help.

But this year had been a bad year.

Bad enough that even my own grandmother had broken down and asked me to cover her electricity bill.

It was frustrating sometimes because I had all this money thanks to my job, and my entire family refused to let me help them.

Stubborn asses.

“Oh, okay. Well it’s right here, let me…”

My sister waved him off. “It’s okay. We know where it is.”

She said it so sweetly that the woman nodded and smiled, when in reality, my sister was being an asshole.

She’d perfected the art of saying “fuck off” without actually saying “fuck off.”

And she did it so nicely that you couldn’t even tell that she was doing it.

“Noel.” I laughed.

She rolled her eyes. “We don’t need her to show us because it’s literally right there in the middle of the mall.”

We were at an outdoor mall that had tons of shops in a star shape leading off of the central hub. It was an awesome outdoor shopping experience, and something that Hooker, Oklahoma, had finished only recently.

It wasn’t brand new, per se. Some of the buildings in downtown Hooker had been renovated and turned into outdoor lounging areas, while others that were in pretty bad disrepair had been torn down completely.

With the already star shape of the downtown area, it worked out well to promote foot traffic instead of vehicles.

“I’ll be at the food truck there getting coffee. You grab the rest of the angels.”

I gave her a thumb up and walked up to the tree.

But as I got closer, I didn’t go pulling off all of the angels and stacking them in my hand. I instead went to one white cardstock paper in particular and reached for it.

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