My grandma taught me to do burnouts in her car when I was fourteen.
“The soup will be ready in twenty minutes.”
“Sounds good.” I lay on the crushed-velvet sofa, wrapped up in sadness and the smell of soup, and stared at the television. “Thanks.”
“You do know, darling,” my grandmother said, carrying an afghan across the room and laying it over my legs, “that your worth is greater than what Josh or any other boy thinks.”
“I know.” But I didn’t. I didn’t want to listen to her be kind when the reality was that I wasn’t enough for Josh.
He’d texted me five times since I’d left school:
Can we talk?
Did you leave?
Meet me by my locker after school—please?
Going to go to the library now, but I did nothing wrong, Em. This isn’t fair.
Now I’m pissed. Call me.
I was just too broken to formulate words and sentences in response to his inquiries. Every time I tried—and I tried every five minutes or so—I ended up crying and picturing him kissing Macy.
“Sometimes I don’t understand why you don’t open your mouth and say the words that are on your tongue,” my grandma said, walking over to the kitchen and turning down the stove. “I get the privilege of hearing you let loose with your anger. Others should, too. You are not the people-pleasing mouse you purport yourself to be. Burn some cities down with your rage!” Her speech was punctuated with her aggressive stirring of the soup.
“What do you want me to do, Grandma? Just unload on people?”
“A little bit, yes.” She glanced over her shoulder at me and said, “Quit worrying about making everyone else happy.”
“I’m not good at it like you.” Grandma Max was fierce and absolutely incapable of losing an argument. “It’s easier to just say what the people want.”
She grabbed two bowls out of the cupboard and started filling them with soup. “But doesn’t that eat you up inside?”
I shrugged. My insides were shredded, regardless of how they got that way. I pictured Josh and felt my heart literally get heavier in my body. Because if he wasn’t a match for me, what did I know about love… or anything? It’d been hours since I’d left school, and I felt like I should be finding some perspective, but instead I just felt empty.
I dropped the throw on the sofa, went over to the table, and sat beside my grandma, thinking about the newest awful decision I had to make. I’d sat at this table with her hundreds of times. Could I really leave her and go to Texas? She said she’d be fine if I decided to go, but would I? My grandma was one of my best friends, and the only one I was ready to tell about Texas yet. I’d like to say I was worried about how my widowed grandmother would survive without my presence, but it really was the other way around.
She took a bite of her soup. “Pepper!”
“What?”
She went over to the stove and started messing with the stockpot. “I was distracted and forgot to add pepper. Grab some and sprinkle it in your bowl before you take a bite.”
“I’m sure it’s—”
“Don’t be lazy. Go get the pepper shaker in the china cabinet and properly season your soup.”
I went over to the armoire and pulled out the tabby-cat pepper shaker. “I doubt pepper will make that big of a difference.”
“Hush and shake.”
I shook pepper into my bowl, sat down, and lifted my spoon to my mouth. But instead of tasting grandmotherly deliciousness, my mouth was instantly on fire. In a very bad way.
“Gah!” I felt a shock go through my entire body. My spoon fell to the floor and I grabbed the glass of milk she’d set beside my bowl. I gulped down every drop, but my mouth was still burning. I ran over to the kitchen sink and put my lips under the faucet, turning it on and sucking down every wet, extinguishing drop I could get.
“Dear Lord, Emilie, what has gotten into you? Did you over-pepper your soup?”
I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. My mouth was still simmering, but it no longer felt like my saliva was going to eat away at my teeth. “I don’t know what’s in that shaker, Grandma, but it isn’t pepper. My mouth still tastes like fire and I barely used any.”
“Oh, my.” Grandma Max’s eyes narrowed. “You used the tabby shaker?”
“It has a ‘P’ on it.”
Her eyes got a little twinkle, even though she didn’t smile. “That atrocious pepper shaker was a wedding gift from my mother-in-law. It has lived in my cabinet since I received it fifty years ago. I didn’t even know it had anything in it.”
“Are you telling me that I just ate whatever was inside of the shaker when Great-Gram Leona bought it? A half-century ago?”
She coughed around a laugh.
“What if it was those ‘Do Not Eat’ silica pellets?”
My grandma walked over to the table and shook some into her palm. “No.” She lifted her hand and sniffed. “It appears to be pepper, just very old pepper.”
“Fifty-year-old pepper. Perfect.” My mouth tasted like the bottom of a dumpster. “That’s it. I’m going to bed.”
“But it’s only seven o’clock.”
“I know, but I feel like every minute I’m awake on this nightmarish day is a danger to my life. So far, this Valentine’s Day has wrecked my car, revoked my fellowship, stolen my boyfriend, moved my dad far away, and possibly poisoned me. I’m going to read myself to sleep before things get any worse.”
“I find it unlikely that things could get any worse.”
“Right?” I walked over to the linen closet and grabbed the clear bag of bedding that Grandma always kept clean for my sleepovers. “But I’m erring on the side of caution, just in case.”
