Homewrecker

15 - 𝓼𝓪𝓯𝓮

The inside of the church was sweltering hot, dizzyingly hot it felt to me, because it didn't have air conditioning. Or maybe it did, before, and an air conditioning unit was just another thing the tornado had ripped away from where it belonged and flung miles away, through the roof of a random house or into an overflowing creek several hundred feet from the road. I hadn't even gone into the sanctuary yet, just lingering around the entrance where windows and doors were propped open, everything smelling damp and wet whenever I breathed in.

The pavements of the street were dark and glistening, leaves were still scattered over the roads and in the grass like it was autumn, and the church was missing a few shingles. There was a blunt stump near the parking lot, where cracks had stretched out over the asphalt. There were posters stapled to the telephone poles that hadn't been snapped in half, the papers soaked and the colors in the grainy images of lost pets bleeding together.

It was almost like the tornado just happened, seconds before we drove back into town, because it was like nothing had been cleaned up. Nothing had been restored. Houses were still torn apart, still just collapsed planks of wood and insulation cluttered together on front lawns, and cars were still overturned in ditches or in cornfields amongst the crops that were starting to wilt around them. The uprooted trees that weren't blocking the roads were left there still, dirt still clinging to the exposed roots that dangled in the air, and random pieces of soaked furniture were still littered throughout town. There was a mattress on the sidewalk near downtown, an oven on its side in front of a park, even a bathtub in one of the parking spaces at the local library.

It was like, even though everything seemed to be happening so fast for me, living a totally and completely different life two weeks ago than the one the tornado had brought me into now, everything here had stopped. Like sand suspended in an hourglass.

My skin felt warm and clammy as my fingers curled around the collar of the dress Taylor-Elise had selected for me to wear, one that was black like the Solidays wanted and me adjacent like she wanted, at least according to her anyway. It was sleeveless, with a higher neckline than I was used to wearing but she insisted it looked good on me, with a defined waist that turned into a flowing skirt around my knees.

She reached behind my ears, loosening a few strands to frame my face, and offered to let me use her perfume since she said I was probably going to be hugged a lot today and thought sugary vanilla would smell nice to people. She ran a chilled jade roller under my eyes to decrease the splotchy puffiness there.

I watched her carefully as she did all of this, confused. "Why are you doing all of this?" I asked her, gesturing to the dress I was wearing, the jade roller in her hand, the braid I felt against my back. "You don't even like me."

She kept pressing the jade roller against my skin. "I don't dislike you or anything," she explained before taking the roller away from my face and placing back into a small refrigerator she actually kept her skincare products inside in her own adjoining bathroom, on the counter near the sink. "But Andi—she's . . . my best friend. And having you around is hard for her, so I take her side. Like, always. But I'm not coldhearted or anything. Your mom died and you needed a dress to wear."

"I'm not trying to make things hard for her. I don't really want to be there either."

She sighed. "And she knows that. It's just a lot for everyone, I guess."

And maybe she had been right about that, about it being a lot for all of them too, but that wasn't how it looked to me then inside of the church, feeling the stale and humid air against my neck and under my arms with only the overhead ceiling fans in the sanctuary with their dull and dusty blades trying to pierce through it.