Page 5 of Level Up
Mom and Gram are a strange pair. And having spent my entire life sharing a house with them, in one form or another, has probably made me strange as well. But with my skewed perspective on the matter, I’m not even sure how strange.
“How did it go this week?” Gram asks me while trying to pick up a piece of goat cheese gnocchi with a pair of chopsticks. She recently learned how to use them and is now obsessed. “The streaking?”
“Streaming,” Mom corrects her, stabbing several maple roasted Brussels sprouts onto her fork before shovelling it into her mouth.
“Yeah, I play video games, Gram.” As I’ve explained a thousand times. “I don’t take off my clothes on camera.”
“Remember what I told you about that?” Mom gives me a stern look, and I sigh.
“Don’t take off my clothes on camera unless they pay first,” I say in a monotone.
“Good girl.”
“But seriously, you don’t have to worry,” I add, chewing a bite of my herb-roasted chicken. “No one wants to see any of this.” I gesture to my rather mediocrechestalregion. I was not endowed the same way Mom and Marie were.
Actually, I hardly look like either of them at all. They both have strawberry blonde, wavy hair and hourglass figures, whereas I have a rat’s nest of dark brown curls on my head and a pear-shaped figure, as Gram told me. Which is the polite way of sayingsmall boobs, big butt.
We all have the same eyes, though. Warm brown with amber flecks. It’s nice knowing I have something of my mother’s in me, and not just some asshole who left her the moment the strip turned pink. Or is it blue? Orange? Maybe it’s just lines—I’ve never seen a pregnancy test in my life, so I have no idea. From what I understand, though, he was a dirtbag who barely tolerated my sister’s existence, and he and my mother were never really that serious anyway. Can’t say I’m dying to meet the guy.
Marie’s dad, on the other hand, has always been pretty nice. When we were kids, he would even let me come along when he’d take her to the Ontario Science Centre or Canada’s Wonderland. But I made the mistake of calling himDadonce when I was too little to know better, and Marie let me have it; apparently, I wasn’t allowed to call him that, only she was. That’s when I learned whathalf-sistermeant—a label I’ve never quite been comfortable with. Just like most of them, I suppose.
“You’d be surprised,” Gram says with a knowing nod, though she’s staring down at her gnocchi, repositioning the chopsticks in her hand. “Men are fools.”
“Yeah, really flattering to hear that any guy who wants to see me shirtless is a fool, Gram.” I stab my fork into the slab ofchicken on my plate so hard that herb-infused butter squirts out at me and I curse under my breath.
“All I’m saying is you could draw tits on a watermelon, and they’d want to see it shirtless,” Gram adds.
I glance over at my mother, who doesn’t seem bothered by this conversation either. “How many glasses has she had?”
“Two, I think.” Mom is barely paying attention as she inspects one of her sprouts closely, like it has personally wronged her in some way.
“Did I tell you what happened to Victory today?” I say in an attempt to change the subject away from watermelons.
“Now that’s someone who could make a lot of money going shirtless,” Gram says absently. She pops a gnocchi into her mouth that she accidentally skewered with the chopstick. That’s one way of doing it, I guess.
“No,” Mom says to me, ignoring my grandmother entirely. “I don’t believe you did.”
“Well, you know Pal who works at Reggie’s?”
“The one with the blue hair?”
“Yeah! They actually asked Victory out to dinner when we went over there,” I tell her excitedly. “Vic’s been low-key stalking them at the shop formonths, and I finally convinced her to just say something to them, and they?—”
A loud clatter outside the window startles us all, and Gram goes over to open the blinds and check. Mom and I aren’t concerned, though, because it’s obviously just?—
“Bitte!” Gram says, sliding open the window and popping out the screen enough for a grey cat to squeeze in and sit on the inner windowsill patiently. “Is Danke not with you today?”
“You have to stop feeding the cats,” Mom tells her. “You’re allergic.”
“But if I don’t feed them, who will?” Gram calls back to her, already on her way to the kitchen to get the cat food shekeeps on hand, despite the fact that she doesn’t actually have a cat.
“Literally everyone on this block feeds them, Gram,” I point out when she returns. “Those cats are freaking royalty. They aren’t going without.”
“Mom, you’re going to get hives again,” my mother says, getting up and skirting around the table to help, so that Gram doesn’t end up touching the cat by accident—or on purpose, since she has a tendency to try to pet the cats without us noticing. And then gets hives.
I keep eating my chicken, as if we don’t have a royal guest in our company, until Bitte leaves and Mom and Gram wash up and return to the table.
“Sorry,” Mom says to me, shuffling her chair as she gets seated. “What were you saying?”
