Beach Day

32: Tiff Breaks And Enters (A Little)

As she watches her mother leave for the familiar red car outside, she wants to yell out and ask if she ever loved her. She kind of wants to pray. She knows, standing there with her heart in her shaking hands: she doesn't want to know the answer.

Still reeling from the blow, Tiff forgets about the weight of cookies in her pocket and the keys somewhere in her jacket and just... freezes. She only stands there for a minute before she manages to remember that she has to be normal. She has to keep moving. Feeling nothing isn't the Tiff Sheridan way.

She scolds herself as she ducks into the chapel itself: you should have expected this. This is exactly what she was afraid of months ago. She told Betty. She told the Time Gnome. She should have listened to herself. She shouldn't have let that naive little animal in her chest hold out on any sort of hope; she should have killed it with a rock like a field mouse in the kitchen.

The urge to pray washes over her again, another wave on the sand of her brain. It's a surge of electricity in the lab; it's a pulsar flickering in and out.

It's also unbelievably stupid. She doesn't even believe in God anymore. The universe isn't god. It's just the name she gave to something she could blame. There isn't anything sentient out there creating planets and afterlives— not something omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent, not something by the actual name of God.

It's just people. People, forces, and bureaucracy— not one great divine creator. Not that she can see.

Maybe she was never a good believer, but, goddammit, she tried her best. Shouldn't that— all of her syrupy faith and her aqueous wonder poured on the ground between a book and a steeple— have been enough?

She wants to resent her mother the same way she resents the church. But the church didn't know how much she loved the rodeo and hated to get in trouble. The church didn't buy sliced turkey and mayonnaise and good, thick white bread for sandwiches when she was out exploring or watching Andy in the living room. The church didn't take detangler, brush, and comb to a mountain of hair she could never properly tame herself. Between all of the bad moments— yelling over dinner, making her sit outside for hours, making sure she knew she wasn't anything, walking on eggshells until all that was left was sand— there was good. It never felt like a waste of time to let her mother love her, even if she was weird about dress lengths. Even if she hated Tiff's rock collection and the photos she would develop at Walgreens and hang on her wall. Even if she hated Tiff.

She sits at a pew until she feels like a person again. It takes a while. When it's over, she wipes her nose against the back of her hand. Maybe she can blame that on humidity. Or religion. Or the smell of white chocolate melting in her pocket.

She takes one of the ill-placed cookies out of her jacket and bites into it. Almond skin scrapes her tongue. It's a good distraction, as is the chapel itself. She lets herself think about it— that it really is kind of weird that there are basement windows she can see from outside, but she has never been in a basement here. She isn't sure anyone has. It exists, so there has to be a way in.

Reasonably, there are only a few places where a door to a secret basement could exist. It couldn't be in any of the classrooms. They each have one window and one door. Unless she wants to start pulling carpet, odds are that she isn't going to find anything.

She doesn't want to pull carpet. She did that with Denny back in November, when it was finally time to get the mold out of the cabin, and it was exhausting. She's still a little too numb and a little too "not a twenty-three-year-old tank of a werewolf" to try to do that herself. Plus, there's the vandalism aspect of it. She doesn't want to feed the persecution complex, as much as pulling carpet can be considered "vandalism."