Bia

After swimming, Calyx asked Fable what she wanted to do most. When you have money, I suppose, everything is an option. I wish I was that lucky.

“Ice cream! I’ve always wanted to eat ice cream. It seems amazing,” Fable gushed, her wet curls dripping down her back.

I took a towel and rubbed some of the water off her arms. She looked up at me gratefully and I wondered where this maternal instinct was coming from. It’s not like she was really my cousin, so why did I care so much?

“Ice cream it is,” Calyx grinned, and that’s how I found myself in a red padded booth with a slowly melting ice cream cone in my hand.

My eyes followed one of the mint chocolate chip drips to the table, where it plopped into a small puddle by other drips. Fable looked at me, chocolate ice cream surrounding her mouth.

“Why are you wasting it? Why aren’t you eating it? Why?” she demanded.
I laughed. “Have you actually tasted any of the ice cream, or is it all on your face?”
“What?” Fable glanced at her reflection in the window. “Oh. I- oh.”

Calyx’s eyes brushed over the both of us and with the hand that wasn’t holding her maple pecan cone she retrieved her iPod from her pocket.
“Here, Fable, put one of these in your ear. It’s music,” she explained. “I think you’ll like it.”

As the spunky girl tried to figure out how to play with the iPod, Calyx gave me a startling look. I licked my cone and pretended not to have noticed.

“Bia,” she hissed.
I bit down on a chocolate chip. “What?”
“We have a problem. We have a child with us who doesn’t belong to either of our families. What if anyone goes looking for her? What if we get caught? The laws...” Calyx trailed off.

I watched Fable bounce in her seat to some form of upbeat music. A part of me wanted to ignore this conversation as well, but I’d never been able to afford an iPod. And the cheap MP3 player I’d bought for myself died a couple months ago.

“What song is that?” I asked.
Calyx looked bewildered. “Ah, what?”
“The song she’s listening to. Which one is it?” I repeated.
“No Doubt. Probably, anyway. That’s what I have most of. Ska. I like that type of music,” she mused. “It’s comforting.”

I was familiar with the music genre, but I’d never really preferred it over any other genre. I liked indie bands, musical groups with the balls to be something different.

“No one’s going to know. She’s a gypsy. We’ll be fine. Everything will be okay,” I told her in a soothing voice.

A burst of laughter, evil laughter, from another booth alerted me to the other patrons in the ice cream parlor. A skinny blond twig about my age was sitting with a nearly identical chubby boy who, like Fable, was covered in ice cream.

She was not laughing at a joke. She was laughing at him.

Bitch.