“You’re taking awfully long!” Connie yells up the stairs. “Like, even longer than Di would take.”
“Hey,” Beddy hears Di faintly.
“You should stay here. With me. I’m still so hungry. You don’t want me to eat myself again, do you?”
She thinks about eating herself, just mowing across her body like it was an ear of corn, cramming the cob of her body into her ever-expanding mouth, her lips inverting around the back of her head, and when she swallowed her head and ceased to be, then, finally, he would shut up.
“If you don’t come down in thirty seconds, I’m coming in there and throwing you over my shoulder Viking-style and carrying you out, okay? Thirty seconds!”
Beddy locks the deadbolt. She stands back.
“Try doing that now,” she says quietly. “Besides, you can’t lift me.”
“No one can,” Void says.
“If you think I haven’t been counting, you’re wrong! Twenty one!”
Connie’s voice is coming closer.
“Nineteen!”
Closer still.
“Sixteen!”
The stair creaks, which means she has three left before she reaches the hall. “Goddamnit! Do I really have to do the full countdown?”
She is clearly in the hall.
“Fine! Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Five. Four. Three. Two.”
There is a pause, and the doorknob rattles furiously on “one.”
“They’re here,” Void says.
“You’re kidding,” Connie says. “You locked us out.”
“Beddy,” Di says.
“She locked us out. I’m going to bust this fucking door down.”
“Connie! Don’t do it. Let’s reason with her first.”
“Nope. Brute force.”
“Oh God! What are you going to do with that fire extinguisher?”
Fire extinguisher? Beddy frantically flips the deadbolt and the doorknob lock pops loudly as she throws the door open. Connie and Di are standing there. There is no fire extinguisher in sight.
Di smiles.
“She’s a drama dweeb, remember?” Connie says. She turns to Di. “So was that improv, or acting? I get them confused.”
“Both.”
Connie looks sternly at Beddy and jerks her thumb over her shoulder. Beddy bows her head and follows them down the stairs. “You wouldn’t have been able to lift me, anyway,” she says. “No one can.”
“Don’t be a cunt to yourself.”
“Getting out of here will do you some good,” Di says. “Take your mind off things.”
“You want me to plot, but at the same time you want to take my mind off things,” Beddy says. “YOU CAN’T DO BOTH!”
She says this so loud. Louder than she meant to. Louder than she ever can recall being in front of them. She is normally so careful. Di and Connie go silent, the latter which is nigh impossible to achieve. Di looks panicked and Connie looks abnormally moved.
She walks through the kitchen, and sees the freshly washed dishes in the rack. They had moved quickly. She feels bad for yelling. She picks up a dish. It’s mostly clean. She’ll have to clean it again when she gets back, but she really appreciates the gesture. The magazine is gone and the water has drained.
“Get in the car,” Connie says. “Get out of this fucking house, and into the car.”
The house isn’t the problem. It’s what’s outside the house. And at the same time, it’s what’s inside her. Why don’t they understand this? Her pain is like an appendage, going everywhere she goes. It can’t just be lopped off. She knows how that went for Aunt Simone.
Connie shoves her softly to the door. Di holds it open for them, and for a moment, as she checks that she’s leaving with everything she came with, she looks like she’s holding it open for Void, who has floated down the stairs and now lingers in the doorway. Is he coming along?
“Please don’t,” she says, fearfully.
Di pauses, looking inquiringly at Beddy. Void stays hovering where he is, and she pulls the door closed, but in that space of time before it does he says, “Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back. I’ll always be here.”