What Happened That Night

9 ~ a n i s t o n

When my father came home from work and saw the golden egg yolk beginning to crust on my sister's bedroom window, a few fragmented white and jagged pieces of shell on the driveway that had fallen down from the window pane, he wanted to call the police about it. He was angry. He was cursing under his breath as he got out the ladder from the garage and an old dish cloth and window cleaner from the kitchen, and climbed up to clean Emily's window. He was scrubbing the window and just muttering to himself as he did, the muscles in his bearded jaw tense and his back rigid. He had shaken off his jacket, tossing that on the carpeted stairs of the living room, and he had rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt and even though his breath was coming out in puffs, he didn't seem to realize that he might've been cold up there, trying to clean the egg off of her window. He called down to me, his voice snapping like a ruler against knuckles, if my mother had called the police yet. It seemed pretty pointless to me, consider the fact that he had already scrubbed off most of the crusty bits of egg yolk and whites.

And, apparently, my mother thought it was pointless too because she didn't call the police. She stepped out of the house, wrapping a knitted cardigan around her arms and chest, and her bare feet were planted on the Welcome! mat outside our front door, and right then our house felt anything but welcoming. She told my father that she thought calling the police wouldn't do anything good, that it wasn't as if they could dust for fingerprints or just the eggshells to determine what brand it was and then track them down. I noticed, as she wrapped the cardigan around herself tighter, shrugging, that her eyes were rimmed red and that her cheeks were flushed, and I realized that we had caught her in one of those rare moments where she had nothing to prove, nothing to ignore, and nothing to pretend.

"Well, at least it would be doing something!" my dad retorted, the annoyance dripping off of the tone of his voice like the egg yolk dripping from the surface of the window pane, and then he just grunted, turned away from her, and continued to scrub away at the window, window cleaner bubbles forming and pushed to the edges. Even from the driveway, I could smell the chemicals.

My mother just nodded, somewhat bitterly as she became to step inside, taking her feet off of the Welcome! mat, and muttered, "Like annoying the police."

My father must have heard this because he stopped his constant scrubbing, his hand stilling in the center of a circle he had been rubbing with the old dish cloth with a worn pattern involving yellow ducks in aprons and trays of chocolate chip cookies, and his grip tightened around the nozzle of the window cleaner as he looked back at my mother, calling out, "Samantha," but she had closed the front door before he could say anything else.

.

I was sitting in the cafeteria, using my plastic, white fork to stab at the somewhat wilting leafs of lettuce that constructed my salad on my plate, and quietly chewing on the tip of my straw that poked out of my bottle of apple juice and leaned against the rim, teeth marks flattening the white straw, when I felt a whoosh of heated air against my face as someone sat down in front of me on the other side of the table, a rattling clank of their tray smacking against the surface of the table and the Granny Smith apple that was perched on a napkin rolled over and onto the table as I caught a strong whiff of fruity perfume as whoever sat in front of me, with honey colored fingers, tore open the plastic that encased their silverware.

"Hey," the person said, bubbly, and I glanced up from my plate of wilted lettuce, bruised cherry tomatoes, and dried sliced carrots to see The Pink Girl sitting in front of me, her fruity perfume emanating off of her in waves like the ocean on the shore, and when she tore off the plastic from her silverware, she folded it and gently placed it by the edge of her tray and picked up her Granny Smith apple, puckering her bright pink lips to blow at it, and then gently but swiftly set it back on the napkin. "This seat free?" I blinked at her, and then took in her pink T-shirt with an owl wearing hipster glasses emblazoned on the front, her pink plastic headband, pink eye-shadow, and golden locket with a pink gemstone in the center. There was just so much pink.