Chapter 11 Rachel

Chapter 11 Rachel

I wake up with a start, panting. I look at the time and see that it is only five in the morning. I go to my kitchen to get a glass of water. I gently drink it. I slowly make my way back to my room and go back to bed. I go back to sleep, expecting another nightmare that I don’t get.

 

“Honey?” my mom calls from the hallway. She pops into the room. “Want to come to the store with me?”

I stretch out, looking at the clock: 10:30. “Sure, just let me get dressed and eat some food.”

“Alright, I can make you something if you want.”

“No, no,” I insist, “I’ll just have cereal.”

I get dressed in a spring green shirt and black pants. I grab my sandals and head into the kitchen. I still feel drowsy. I hold my arm out and I let my weight fall against the fridge. I hit my head and suddenly collapse onto the floor.

“Rachel! Are you okay?” Roquelle yells from the living room.

“Fine!” I call, standing up.

I attempt to open the fridge again and this time pull it right open. I take out the milk, and go to the pantry to get the cereal. I firmly grab a box of chocolaty bits. As I walk out of the pantry, it falls to the floor. None of the cereal spills out of the box, and I hurriedly pick the box back up. My mom waits by the door by the time I’m done eating. I follow her outside and go around to the passenger’s side of the van. I grab the handle and pull, but it slips through my fingers. After a second attempt, it opens right up. I plop down in the seat with a sigh.

“Something wrong?” my mother asks.

“Just having an off-day,” I tell her.

We head off.

“First, I’d like to buy some clothes for you kids for school, oh and Jack needs a new pair of shoes. Or was that Roquelle? No, you know what, I’m sure it was Jack. He said he was playing soccer at recess and they got a hole ripped right through them somehow. Anyway, afterward I’d like to stop by the grocery store and pick up… well, everything on the list, plus steak, your father really wants to have steak this weekend, so I said okay, I’ll pick some up. Hmm… is there anything you need, Rachel?”

I shake my head.

“Off to get the clothing then.”

“Good with me.”

 

We arrive a large clothing store, and my mom gravitates toward the women’s section first.

“I’d just like to get a nice skirt or pair of capris or something, since winter’s ending.”

“I think winter ended in March,” I tell her.

“Oh, yes, right, now I remember.”

We begin looking at all the spring skirts and dresses. My mother grabs a bunch of stuff off the racks. She goes into the dressing room and makes me wait outside as she changes into each one and shows them to me. The first one she comes out in is an all-pink dress that goes to the knees. It has black and white polka-dots showering it in irregular intervals. Likewise, a spotted belt pulls it together.

“Pretty,” I say. I wrinkle my nose, “That’s a lot of polka-dots.”

She looks in the mirror and laughs. “Yeah, maybe something simpler. Or, not simpler, just less… patterny?”

I giggle and she returns to the dressing room. When she comes out again, she is wearing her black blouse she came in with, but is wearing a flowing yellow skirt. It’s very full, and falls past her knees, with a large pink flower off to one side.

“Too much?” she asks innocently, twirling her skirt a little.

“Too much yellow, too much poof, and too much flower.”

“Too much,” we repeat in unison, and she goes flying back into the dressing room.

My mom comes out in skirts and dresses of varying colors and styles. She finally finds a dress we both like, a simple blue dress with a gray belt, and goes back in to change. I still feel exhausted from the night before. I yawn, holding my hand up to my eyes and closing them. When I open my eyes back up I glance around the room to find the employee staring at me. I lower my hand from across my eyes… This gives me pause. Was I looking through my hand? I look down at my hand. It looks completely normal. I shake my head. I’m just tired, is what I tell myself.

We go into the other sections of the store. After much searching, we decide on a gray striped suit for my father. My mom picks out a few pairs of pants for Roquelle. I decline new clothes. I don’t need them. We pick out a baseball cap for Jack, and go to look for shoes for him. I tell my mom just to get him black ones, the same color as he had now.

“Black will go with anything,” I remind her, and I think it takes all of her willpower not to pick up the bright red shoes off the rack.

Checkout time finally comes and before I know it, we’re back on the road again.

I ask my mom if we could stop by somewhere to get lunch and she agrees enthusiastically.

“Okay, what are you in the mood for? Chicken?” she asks.

“Or tacos?” I suggest.

“Or burgers?”

“Or pizza?”

“Or sandwiches?”

“Whoa, whoa,” I say, “Hold up, sandwiches definitely wins.”

She smiles at me and we go to our local sandwich shop, Robin’s Sandwiches. It’s the best place for food. We walk in, and the staff automatically hollers its warm greetings at us. They each know us by name by now, we come here often enough. The place radiates heat-but not in an uncomfortable way. It has a comfy, homey feel I can never get enough of. A plastic replica of each sandwich they offer stands on their counter. They have a real fireplace on each side of the large room with couches huddled around each. In the middle, they have plastic chairs and tables for those who prefer to sit at them.

“Hello Holly’s,” Phil, the person running the register greets us as we walk up to the counter.

“What’s the special today, Phil?” I ask him.

“Glad you asked. The special today is the classic lunch meat sandwich with a spicy twist. Think you can handle it?”

“Of course,” I say.

“Alright, you heard her, two of those,” my mom orders.

“Coming right up!”

Phil walks into the back to deliver our order, and a wander over to the row of plastic sandwiches. I gingerly pick up the lunch meat sandwich, examining it. The sandwich is detailed so that you can see every ingredient that goes into it. Although my fingers are wrapped tightly around it, I find it clattering back onto the counter. I quickly righten it back where it was.

“Goodness, girlie,” my mom says from behind me, “what is up with you today?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I’m just dropping stuff like my fingers are made of water.”

“Speaking of water,” she says, and hands me an empty cup. “Let’s go get some soda.”

I walk over to the soda machine and fill up my cup with orange soda. We receive our sandwiches shortly and take a seat on one of the couches. Charley, a man who always seems to be asleep on one of the couches, stirs as we begin eating. He looks over at us.

“Hey, Rachel. Hello Ms. Holly.”

“Hi Charley,” my mother says kindly to him. “Still sleeping here on your breaks?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got to sleep some time, don’t I?” He looks at me strangely then. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

I glance down, worried, but nothing appears to be out of order. “What do you mean?” I ask him.

He shakes his head as if to clear it. “Nothing, I just woke up, just a trick of the eyes.”

My mother continues making small talk with Charley while I focus on my sandwich. At first taste, it is much like your typical sandwich- meat, cheese, the works. But a second later, a stronger, spicier taste explodes in my mouth and I hungrily eat the rest. Before too long, my mother is also done and we thank Phil for the sandwich and leave the store.

Next stop: groceries. We run around the store like crazy people trying to find everything just as we do every week. You’d think by now we’d have some idea where the staples of a home might be, but to no avail. It takes us a while, but we finally check out and are headed toward our van when…

“Wait!” my mom yells, pulling the cart to a stop. “We forgot the steak!”

I sigh, looking back at the store we’d just come from.

“I’ll go get it,” I tell my mother.

She gives me the money for it and I quickly jog back inside. I save myself some time by simply asking someone where it is and am soon enough in the checkout line. While waiting for the person ahead of me in line, I lean against the conveyor belt. Suddenly, I feel as though it melts beneath my arm and I have to catch myself to stop-for the second time today-myself crashing to the floor. The cashier looks over at me but I nod at her to indicate that I am okay. When I get to the front of the line, my checkout goes quickly and I am off again. I run to the van, a little frazzled, and not wanting my mother to have to wait any longer for me.

 

When we get home my mom decides to cook the steak out on the grill, and we all decide to swim in our pool while she does. Roquelle and I show Jack how to do somersaults in the water and we all begin trying to link hands while doing it. After a while, Roquelle and I decide to have swimming competitions, but Jack drops out. He’s not nearly as fast as we are. He grabs one of our giant floaters and rides around on it instead. The floater is basically just a green blown up alligator-or crocodile-I don’t really know the difference. It bumps around in the pool, just another obstacle for Roquelle and I as we swim back and forth. I win three out of the five races, and we’re about to start a sixth when my mother calls us to dinner.

“I love steak,” my father says as we sit down at our table outside, all still in our swimsuits, wrapped in towels.

“It’s alright,” Jack says.

We all laugh. It’s well known to my family that Jack is just about the biggest steak-lover any of us know. My mom says when he was really little he would try to grab steaks off the grill. Little brothers, what are you gonna do?

My mom tells my father about how we forgot the steak and I had to run back in to get it.

“Aah, you didn’t have to go through all that trouble for me,” he says innocently.

“Yeah, she did,” Jack inputs.

“Come on, it’d do her some good, give her some muscle,” Roquelle teases.

“We should have brought you along, Roquelle. You would’ve been faster than me.”

“Nah, it would’ve never worked.”

“Or better yet,” I suggest, “you could have run all the way from home once we forgot it, and have gone to get it for us.”

“What a lovely idea,” my mom agrees.

“Okay, I change my mind, you should have just brought me from the beginning,” Roquelle says.

“Yeah? But then all the other shopping would have taken twice as long,” I point out.

It was true. The more there were of us on a shopping trip, the more chaotic it would go. Exponentially so.

“We’d have to shop through tomorrow, but it could still work,” my mom says, giving Roquelle her most serious look she can before we all burst out laughing again.

 

I pull on pajamas and wash my face-getting ready for bed. I am exhausted after the long day. I grab my electric toothbrush out of my room and go into the bathroom, covering the tip of the brush in water and then toothpaste. After I scrub my teeth, I additionally brush the top of my tongue, brushing away all the plaque and grime that has accumulated there. As I brush, my toothbrush slides further and further into my throat, but I don’t choke. In fact, I cease to feel the brush for a few seconds. I yank it out of my mouth and the feeling of the presence of the toothbrush in my mouth returns just as it slides past my lips. I ignore it, spit in the sink, and quickly go to bed.