(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 37; tougher

When Tisper was fourteen, she was sent off to live with her grandmother.

Grandmother Sophie wasn't the type to bake pie, knit sweaters or weed her garden every spring. She didn't feed birds in the park or join a quilting club or complain to cashiers about expired coupons.

Sophie was a lot of things. But more than anything, she was a real hard bitch.

Tisper remembered the first day she'd been dumped at Sophie's home. She didn't want to be there. She missed Phillip. She missed her friends. She missed her mom and her dad, even though they were the ones to banish her away.

Maybe they thought Sophie would "straighten her out"—teach her a lesson, the way hard women like her did. Sophie taught her a lot of things that summer, but nothing like they'd been hoping for.

First and foremost, Sophie taught her how to sew.

Tisper heard her voice so vividly, after all these years: "Why all this?"

Tisper was supposed to be unpacking. She was supposed to be putting away her clothes, setting her bed, hanging her jackets in the tiny wardrobe Sophie had taken out of storage just for her.

But instead Tisper had laid on her bare mattress, crying into the naked seams.

"Why all this, child? Why all the tears? Enough. Enough of this now," Sophie griped from the doorway.

"I don't want to wear all these things, Grandma," Tisper had told her. kicking her suitcase from the bed in a tantrum. "They wouldn't let me pack the clothes I liked. My tank tops and my blouses—mom threw them away. I know she did. I don't want to wear these things."

"Is this how your mother raised you?" Sophie scorned. "Did that woman never teach you in all your life how to fix your own problems? Lord, Tisperella." No one had ever called her that before but herself. "Come. Come now, and bring those clothes you hate so much."

That day, Sophie taught her how to sew. She taught her how to turn t-shirts into skirts and how to iron patches onto denim jackets. That summer, she taught Tisper how to make things for herself. How to respect herself. How to live without the guidance of anyone else.

Grandmother Sophie taught her a lesson that had stuck with her all her life.

"When the going gets tough, she always said, pointing with her crooked old wooden cane, you get tougher.

Tisper wondered just how tough someone could get. If maybe it was possible to wear so much armor, you lose yourself somewhere inside of it.

She watched Quentin in the reflection of the rear-view mirror. He slept with his head against the glass, silent. So silent, it was unnerving. His breath went rigid and shallow, and then deep again. The knight in shining armor, Tisper mused. He's just as lost as the rest of us.

They'd been pulled over at a diner for a good hour. Quentin had been asleep for at least two. Tisper knew he needed rest, but she was so tired of the quiet.

He was too still. Too peaceful. Normal people don't sleep like this, Tisper thought. Normal people groan and grunt and toss and turn. And then suddenly there was movement—the first she'd seen all this time. The deep, worried furrow of his brow.

She hated to wake him, but she was starving. There was no sense in letting a bad dream go on anyways. Tisper poked at his arm once and then twice, and slowly Quentin stirred. He squinted his eyes and blinked at the light from the diner. The world had gone dark around them in the time they'd been gone. He grunted—a confused, tired kind of noise.

"Why do you bake?" Tisper asked, before he could shake the grogginess away.

Quentin rubbed his eyes, kneaded at his at his sore neck. Then looked to her, muddled with sleep. "What?"