Hello! This is the seventh installment of the twenty-one chapter novel In the Pines by Wells Thompson (that’s me). I’ll be publishing one chapter a week on Substack until it’s all up, so if this is the first one you’re seeing, you can find the previous chapters in the Newsletter backlog. I hope you enjoy the ride!
“Tell me more,” Dr. Skinner said simply.
“Like what?” Sarah said, then smiled, unable to contain herself, “Like did he have a car?”
Dr. Skinner chuckled, “I didn’t think you would know about Grease.”
“What, just because I’m young I can’t be cultured? I know all about cheesy seventies musicals.”
“Bet you can’t name another.” Sarah leaned forward, hands pressed together and pointed at the doctor. She wanted her to thoroughly regret this moment before it even began.
“Well, if I were a rich man, I could probably tell you all about what it’s like to be a sweet transvestite from Transexual Transylvania. But I wouldn’t know anything about all that jazz, all I know is that he had it coming because life is a cabaret.”
“That was impressive, although Chicago came out in 2002, so it doesn’t count.”
“The movie, maybe, but the musical debuted in 1975. You come into my house and you challenge me? No, no ma’am!” Dr. Skinner applauded as Sarah sat back in her chair and gave a half bow.
“Are you proud of yourself?”
“Extremely.”
“Good, we all need talents.” Dr. Skinner picked up her notebook and started writing. “Seriously though, tell me more about you and your roommate. It might help you verbalize some of these confused feelings you’ve been having. Or at the very least write them down.”
“I didn’t say I was confused.”
“I didn’t say what field my PhD is in. People don’t say things that are easily implied.”
“You are offensively bad at making me feel comfortable.”
“Then why are you smiling?” Sarah caught herself and couldn’t stop. As much as she wanted to shut down the doctor, she couldn’t help but be amused.
“Okay fine, I guess it can be a bit confusing, but I don’t think there’s a single memory I have of us that isn’t good and bad. Kayla’s the reason I know how to take care of myself, but she’s also impossible to trust and really hard to live with sometimes.”
“How so?”
“Fuck. Maybe I will just write them down. That’s another thing, though, I never used to curse, she dragged that out of me.” Sarah sighed, “Fine. I grew up fairly well off, so when we were on our own I didn’t know how to do anything useful around the house for the longest time.”
***
Sarah felt a bead of sweat creep down her neck as she stared at the crusted sauce and remnants of God-knows-what stuck to the sides of the sink and in between the tiles on the countertop. She’d come prepared for the battle, with rubber gloves, cleaning spray, and three different rags to knock out the mess. It couldn’t be that hard, right? She’d watched Kayla do it before and it didn’t look too challenging. Maybe a little boring, but there was no reason to be scared, she reassured herself. Kayla walked up behind her and craned her long neck to examine Sarah’s look of terror. “The trick is, you’ve got to psych it out, get it scared of you, show it who’s boss.”
“I don’t need your help, okay.” Sarah licked the inside of her lip and stayed frozen in place.
“Yeah, you’ve clearly got a handle on this.” She put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder.
“I’ve never had to do this before, alright.”
“Ah, sweetie, I know. The privilege oozes from every invisible pore on your flawless skin.”
“You’re a jerk.”
“I’ve been cleaning the house since we got this apartment. It’s been almost five months, time to pull some weight.” Kayla was smiling the whole time, something in her loved seeing Sarah so locked up in agony of this simple chore.
“I pull plenty of weight, thank you!” Her finger squeezed in on the trigger of the cleaning agent, not enough to make it squirt, just to feel the tension against her hand.
“Not in the domestic sense. If you ever want someone to wife you up, you’re going to need to learn how to do these things.”
“That’s sexist.”
“Blow me.” She pat Sarah on the back and pointed to a green spot of mold growing on the stain. “You should probably start there.”
“I don’t… I don’t know if I can.”
“I’m sure you’ll do great. It’s boring, but I like to spice it up with role playing. All the little stains are planets with life on them and I am a galactic destroyer looking to decimate all of existence. It’s all in good, clean fun. Now break a leg out there, I need to take a shower.” When Kayla left Sarah watched the mass of mold and packed together mess and almost swear that it was moving on its own. She should have felt disgusted, totally incapacitated by how gross the site was and how it was her fault for letting it get this bad. Instead, she felt nothing, just an empty desire to move along and leave it to fester. Her hands didn’t move and the rags stayed dry. It wasn’t like she was lazy, she worked harder than anyone at her actual job, particularly Kayla, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about this.
Eventually, Kayla wandered back into the kitchen, her hair still trying to bunch up even when wet. Sarah hadn’t moved from the spot Kayla left her in and almost felt ashamed when Kayla looked into her face with disbelief. “Girlie, what are you doing?”
“I just don’t feel like I can.”
“No one feels like cleaning up stuff, it’s just something we have to do.”
“It’s not just that I don’t want to. I can’t find a reason to want this place to be clean.”
“Well. This is a relief. I thought you were little miss perfect and now I know you’re just as inept as I am. Thanks, I feel a lot better.”
Sarah sat down on the floor and cradled the surface cleaner between her legs. Her eyebrows sagged over her eyes and she felt deflated. “I miss… I miss home. Having a home Kayla. We eat here and sleep here but… I don’t care about taking care of it, it still feels like there’s nothing here for me.” Kayla stopped smiling and scratched the top of her head.
“We have friends at the restaurant and we aren’t doing so bad here at the house. I don’t know what else to say.”
“You have friends at the restaurant. The only person there that talks to me at all is Richard, and, thanks to you, he’s just been creeping on me nonstop. I miss having people to hang out with outside of the house and, God help me, I miss school. I didn’t know how much I liked learning about things until I left. Now I just feel like I’m losing my brain.” Kayla sat down next to Sarah and nodded for a few moments.
“I… I think… I mean, it can’t be any worse than back home, right? You ran away, that probably means things weren’t all that great.”
“It is worse.”
“You had a black eye.”
“I didn’t say I was going back.” Kayla put her arm around Sarah. Sarah could tell she was trying her best. Her best was laughable, but she was trying.
“Okay, how about this. Tonight, after work, I’ll pick you up and we can go hang out with some of the girls. It won’t be weird ‘cause I’ll be there and you can have something to do and make a friend that isn’t me. Not that I know why you’d need that, I am amazing after all. Anyway, would that help?”
Sarah leaned into Kayla and grabbed her forearm. It still surprised her that the cast was gone. It stayed on for months after they’d met and only came off when Sarah volunteered to cut it off herself. Now it was paler than the rest of her skin and still felt clammy and cold. “That might be good. You’re sure it won’t be weird?”
“Totally. It’ll be fun. We’ll go to this dive bar downtown, they never card anyone. You won’t even have to feel bad about using a fake.”
“I probably won’t drink if that’s okay.”
“Suite yourself.” She looked at her new phone to check the time. She’d only picked it up last week, but she’d needed to for nearly two months. Her old one was not only outdated, but also split in half and never recovered from the floor of the grocery store. “Shit, I need to go to work. Try to get some cleaning done if you can, I’ll pick you up after my shift. Shifts. Whatever.” Sarah felt herself smiling when she heard the door close and, before long, she was spraying down the counter and trying to guess how much cleaner was too much.
The gunk came up after two or three hard scrubs, and once it started to peel away and stick to the rag, the rest came up without much effort. It was almost enjoyable, watching the surface a rat would consider too dirty to eat from transforming into a polished surface even the pickiest cockroach would be privileged to dine on. After the counter and sink were sparkling, she looked around and knew she could do more. She played some music on her phone and soon became intoxicated with the process of finding a mess and wiping it clean. She thought of the alcoves of the kitchen as folds in the brain and that it was her job to erase nasty, negative emotion from their hiding spots where they can cause havoc and insecurity and crippling anxiety.
Soon enough, the kitchen was spotless and Sarah was weirdly satisfied with her work. She almost wanted to continue doing so in the rest of the house, but found the bathroom and bedroom tidied up already and, while the living room could have used some attention, she still didn’t know how to work the vacuum or even where some of the other cleaning supplies were. She figured she could look for them, but decided against it, instead opting to fill the time by rotting her brain more so than she already had with the endless supply of vapid internet content at her fingertips.
After squealing at videos of dogs for what felt like forever and reading through one of the many webcomics about couples that totally dominated her feed, she looked up and realized it was still only 2 o’clock and that Kayla wouldn’t be back until 5 at least. The apartment was getting stale, even more than usual, and when she looked around the featureless room, she saw the door and became fixated on it. Suddenly she was closing it behind her and walking out into the early summer sun. She felt exposed and small, but took timid, thoughtless steps to the end of the block and looked around her. The neighborhood was dirty, all plastic bags and dead grass with train tracks cutting through the end of the street.
She kept walking in that direction, arguing with herself over what she should be thinking about in this moment. It was just noise, asking why she was out here and telling her that she needed to go back home and telling her to walk just a few more blocks and scolding her for lacking any sense of direction. Maybe it’s best I don’t go out tonight, she heard herself think, who would I talk to, what would I have to talk about? She felt a stinging heat bearing down on her shoulders and she wanted to put her hands in her pockets, but this pair of leggings didn’t have any.
After a minute, she came up on a small park which didn’t seem too dirty or overgrown. There weren’t too many people there, just a couple of men sitting at a table with a game board between them and a small girl on a swing. When she sat down she looked around at the playground and surrounding trees and thought about how sad they looked compared to the ones she’d known back home. She knew she couldn’t go back to her parent’s, but she wondered if there would be a time when she could see Little Rock again. It wasn’t the most glamorous place on Earth, but to her it was still home. She couldn’t dwell on this for too long, the rusty sound of the swinging chain distracted her and she had to watch the girl to keep herself sane.
She was in a denim overall with a pink shirt underneath and dark pigtails. Her white teeth shined bright through her smile, especially against the dark color of skin. Sarah thought she looked adorable and guessed she must have been around five. On a nearby bench, a man and woman, presumably the parents, were talking to each other, though Sarah couldn’t hear what they were saying. The dad had his hair shaved and wore a simple gray t-shirt and jeans, though he still looked colorful through the tattoos on his arms. The mom wore an odd, spiral-patterned dress with pockets that Sarah was immediately jealous of. Sarah didn’t understand why she was drawn to the mom, but she looked her over as the two of them smiled and laughed and maybe even flirted. Her hair was big and dense and even from here, Sarah could see the honey in her brown eyes. She looked like a goddess, Sarah thought.
Then the little girl called out for her dad and he got off the bench to meet her. Sarah watched as he pushed her higher on the swing and even though they were laughing and smiling, Sarah felt a pit in her gut and a pull on the back of her calves. Surely that had been her at some point, surely her dad had pushed her just as high. But here she was, firmly on the ground and somewhere her father... She listened for anything to pull her away and heard the soft tapping of glass on polished wood. She was immediately compelled to find its source and looked away from the family to find the two men she’d seen when she’d entered the park.
When she approached the strangers, she saw that they were playing chess and wordlessly began watching. At first because of how outlandish they looked, especially in comparison to the other. The older of the two men was covered in white hair, with a beard down to his belt and a stark white pony tail draped over his back. The younger was cleaner cut, but his jet black hair was punctuated with an oily sheen that almost made it look plastic. It was nearly enough to distract from his improbably angled mustache, which sprouted from his lip almost like devil horns. As she looked on, however, she became mesmerized by the game itself. The ebb and flow of each piece was entrancing and, though she didn’t know how the game was played or what the pieces meant, there was something wonderful taking place she couldn’t understand in the moment.
Back and forth the two men played on, paying Sarah no attention and focusing entirely on the game as the pieces were moved off the board and the word check periodically passed their lips. At a point, they stopped and looked at eachother, then wordlessly shook hands and stood up from the table. The man with the mustache looked annoyed, so it seemed that the older man had won, but they both walked away without exchanging words, leaving the board on the table and the pieces unattended. Sarah approached the table and tried to make sense of the formation, but couldn’t. She pulled her phone out of her purse and began looking up the rules of the game. There was no one else in the park, no one to explain the game to her or make use of the board so she sat down at the table and tried to make sense of the position as she figured out how the game was played.
At a point, she realized that she couldn’t decipher what was happening with basic knowledge, she would need to actually play the game to understand it. So she downloaded an app to play online since there wasn’t anyone to play with her in person. After fumbling around with the practice tool and figuring out super basic strategy, she set up a match to find an opponent. In the first game she played, it was with the black pieces. She did what she thought was correct, developing both her knights and her e pawn before getting checkmated in four moves. When she got the white pieces and tried to do the same, her queen got chased around and she lost it and the game after only a few moves.
Sarah realized she probably should have been deflated and felt like giving up, but she was excited. She found herself wanting to play more, to cut apart what her opponents were doing and learn how to beat it. She’d already lost ten games by the time she realized it was approaching 6 o’clock. “Oh no!” She said allowed, instinctively looking around. She felt a bit foolish when she realized it was still just her, but then stood up and gathered her purse to go home. Before she left, she took a picture of the board. She still didn’t understand it, but she was going to.
When she got home, she looked around and realized that Kayla wasn’t home yet. At first she worried that she’d left without her, but there were none of the tell-tale tell signs that she’d been there. Kayla’s work clothes would be bundled in the corner and the TV would still be on if she’d come home for any amount of time at all. Sarah was almost more anxious that she hadn’t come home yet than at the thought Kayla left without her, though. She wasn’t convinced she actually wanted to go out and she dreaded explaining that to Kayla, who lived to be out of the house. Regardless, she sat on the couch and started up another game on her phone. When she lost that match, she looked up and saw that Kayla wasn’t there yet, so she started another. She played game after game and lost them in turn, but only grew more excited as she went. Finally, she realized what she liked about the experience, she was learning. She hadn’t won a single game yet, but she could feel herself getting better, and that was exciting.
Sarah fixed herself to her screen and kept pushing herself until, after what could have been forty games, she managed to pick up all of her opponent’s pieces and chase their king all around the board with a queen and a rook. When she finally achieved a checkmate, she threw her hands up and ran around the apartment in excitement. She hadn’t felt this good since she’d gotten an A on her least favorite teacher’s notoriously hard European History exam. Then she set her arms down and listened to the pounding of her heart in her chest until it subsided and she realized it was well past 11 o’clock.
It was still another thirty minutes before Kayla got home, still in uniform and clearly tired. “Hey girlie,” she said casually as she put down her purse and grabbed a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge.
“I thought we were supposed to go out tonight. What happened?” Sarah was more concerned about Kayla than anything. She wasn’t especially used to getting updates from her, but this seemed worrisome even by her standards.
“They made me stay for a double. It was gross.”
“You mean a triple?”
“Sure.”
“You could have called or something.”
Kayla watched Sarah as she chewed on old pizza that amounted to cold cheese and cardboard. When she swallowed, she finally let out, “We can do it another time, today just got a little hectic.” Sarah knew that she was less disappointed than she should have been, but instead of being annoyed with Kayla’s lack of apology, she felt a strange sense of relief. “How did the cleaning go?” Kayla asked, peering back into the kitchen.
“Pretty well, it got easier once I got rolling with it.”
“That’s good, ‘cause I don’t want to do it anymore.” She smiled and winked, but Sarah had a feeling she was being serious. Even so, she found herself unable to dwell on it for long before she was drawn back into her phone. The game pulled her in and demanded her attention. Sarah felt the couch dip beside her and heard Kayla ask her a question, but didn’t listen until she made her next move.
“Hmm?” She finally asked, not taking her eyes off the screen, but tearing her concentration away for a few seconds.
“What are you doing?” Kayla repeated, nudging Sarah in the ribs with her elbow.
“Sorry, I just got into this today after I got done in the kitchen.” Sarah turned her phone over so she wouldn’t be tempted to look over the board. “I got really into it faster than I expected and…” Sarah almost stopped herself when she looked at Kayla’s hands, “I guess I’m getting decent at it.”
“That’s good,” Kayla said, turning them over. Sarah couldn’t tell if Kayla had realized that she’d given herself away. “Everybody needs a hobby I guess.”
“Yeah.” The TV was on, playing a conspiracy documentary entitled “The Truth Behind the Magic Bullet,” but Sarah didn’t hear it. She just traced the stamp in her mind that Kayla had gotten from Queen’s, the dive bar she frequented with her friends after work. The Q had a crown on it, tilted to one side and the word itself was underlined. “Does lying count as a hobby?”
“Only if you’re into poker.” Kayla ate her pizza without consequence, without guilt. Sarah sighed and stood up.
“I’m gonna head to bed, probably.”
“You sure? It’s still kind of early.”
“Yeah. I’m sure.” She crossed the room to her bedroom door before calling back to Kayla. “You should probably wash your hands.” She didn’t get a response as she closed the door and sat down on the dressed up air mattress she’d grown used to sleeping on these last five months. She couldn’t force herself to be angry, she hadn’t really wanted to go out in the first place and this wasn’t the first time Kayla lied about something petty. In truth she was angrier at herself for not expecting it, and for wasting the energy it took to be disappointed.
She looked back over the picture of the chess game in the park and finally saw why the game had ended. White was about to sacrifice his queen for a forced check in three moves. It was a clean victory and there was nothing black could do to stop it. Sarah almost started up another game, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. She felt deflated. Every time she asked herself why she put up with Kayla’s nonsense, she remembered how she screamed at her in the grocery store only a few months back. How Kayla told her she would be back in Little Rock by now if it weren’t for her. It made her sick and angry and hurt, but she knew Kayla was absolutely right.
This story is considered a work in progress for legal reasons.
© 2024 Wells Thompson
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.