The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [88]
Otis shoved her off him and scooted off the bed. She rose to attack him again, but he pushed her back on Mrs. Archer’s bed, maybe a little too hard. His cheek stung where she’d scratched it. “You need to see a psychiatrist.”
“I’m not seeing any more shrinks! You have no idea what my life is like. How dare you!”
What was she talking about?
He ran out of the house, leaving Rusty screaming after him, calling him names. He walked home in the suffocating heat, wondering how he’d gotten mixed up with such a maladjusted individual. He touched his cheek where she’d scratched it and his finger came away bloody. To think he’d told her he loved her!
He did love her.
But science was calling him. Science was reliable. Science was his true love.
Part Five AUGUST 2006
Buff’s house was so different from Suzi’s house. In Buff’s house the furniture all looked and smelled new, and in the living room everything was blue and white, in the kitchen red and white, in little Angel’s room pink and white. Everything matched! Buff’s house had soft wall-to-wall carpet in all the rooms, even the bathroom; and the bathroom sinks didn’t have dried toothpaste globs and lone hairs in them and old eye shadow and blush containers spilling over on the counters. At Buff’s house there were dried flower arrangements in every room and a bowl of fresh fruit on the dining room table. There were family photos everywhere—of his family, not their dead relatives. Huge framed photos, taken outdoors, the kind where everyone in the family wears a white shirt. In all the pictures Buff looked so handsome, an older brother of Orlando Bloom. Paula’s blond hair hung down in perfectly straight curtains. Rusty’s wavy reddish brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Baby Angel had no hair. Except for Angel, they looked like an orthodontist’s advertisement.
The whole setup—the family and the house—made Suzi angry because she knew that the reason they looked so perfect and that their house looked so perfect was because they didn’t have two teenagers with Asperger’s throwing fits and hoarding things and a stinky old granddad (she loved him, though!) and a dad who never came home and a mom who slopped around looking hideous and making nasty remarks and claiming to be too tired to do anything but hide in her room and read. If she lived in a house that looked like Buff’s house, she’d bring friends home with her all the time. As it was now, she was always embarrassed when Mykaila and Sierra and Sienna came over, and she ended up apologizing over and over until they told her to shut the hell up.
Of course, Suzi knew that everything wasn’t as dandy at Buff’s house as it seemed. For one thing, Rusty had become a total reject misfit who wouldn’t even babysit her own little sister, or maybe couldn’t be trusted to babysit her. And there was something way wrong with a married man, a minister for God’s sake, who was obsessed with Ava.
Suzi might have found Buff’s obsession with Ava to be hilarious and only hilarious if not for two things: 1. Why Ava? What was so great about her? And 2. the fact that Ava wouldn’t have any part of Buff. Ava hadn’t been back to church since that one time, and after the Wakulla Springs trip she’d refused to go to youth group. She didn’t have an appreciative bone in her body. She was waiting for Elvis to rise up from his tomb and marry her. Did she not realize how cool Buff was? A hot minister! How cool was that? Maybe Buff would divorce his wife and marry Ava! Although nobody in their right mind, once they realized how annoying Ava was, would want anything to do with her. Of course, Ava was gorgeous to look at, prettier than Suzi, even, if you just looked at her.
Suzi could probably get Buff in big trouble if she told people about his obsession with Ava, and maybe she would, but she’d tell when she was good and ready. Her mother would spaz and she’d never let Suzi go back to that church