Page 12 of The Lies I've Told
Wow, that sounded familiar.
“I’ll treat him like royalty, promise.”
“Thank you,” she said, clearly relieved. “Okay, I’ve got to go. I can feel a contraction coming on, and I think you should remember me in this moment as being happy and not cursing my husband for being born.”
I let out a giggle before saying good-bye.
My sister was having a baby.
She was creating a family.
And I was getting drunk in my closet.
Well, not anymore.
Feeling like I had a new purpose, I jumped to my feet. I still felt a little wobbly, but there was nothing like ambition to cure a tipsy head.
A few days at home? It was exactly what I needed.
There, I could clear my head and get refocused, and when I came back…
Well, let’s just say, bitches had better be ready.
“Where are you headed again?” the tipsy woman sitting next to me in first class asked once again.
“Ocracoke,” I answered.
“Where?” She giggled, taking another sip of her wine.
I’d been on this plane with her for a grand total of thirty minutes, and I already wanted to kill myself.
Repeatedly.
“Ocracoke,” I said slowly. “It’s a small island off the coast of North Carolina. That’s a state in the southern region of—”
“I know where North Carolina is,” she said, her words slurring together.
Normally, I’d go for her type—the well-dressed, expensive, but easy kind of girl who made being single everything it was meant to be. Fun and string-free.
But, today, I wasn’t into it. Or her.
She must have gotten the clue when I stopped speaking to her and instead sought out entertainment elsewhere. Slipping on the noise-canceling headphones, that, given my current predicament, were worth every penny I’d spent on them, I plugged them into my laptop and zoned out.
Well, I zoned her out at least.
With music blasting in my ears and an entire hour left on this flight, I pulled up my internet browser, thankful for Wi-Fi and began to surf the web.
At first, it was typical stuff, reviews of my show from the night before to social media, but then I began to feel the itch. Those test results were back in my pocket, and before I knew it, I was typing words into the search bar like a goddamn idiot.
I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was the drunk girl, looking over at my screen. I let out a sigh and pulled off my headphones.
“My grandma has that,” she said, pointing to the page I’d pulled up on Google. “Terrible disease.”
I swallowed hard, feeling a trickle of sweat forming at my temple. “Yeah, mine too,” I lied before putting on my headphones and immediately shutting down the laptop.
I felt physically ill from her comment, and it took every bit of strength I had to continue sitting there next to her, stiff as a board, while I was slowing falling apart on the inside.
