After Her Read Free Page B

clothes.
    “Christ, how many fucking camisoles do you own, Cass?” she asks. “Tennis shoes, jeans, wife beaters…there’s no variety. No wonder you can't find yourself a decent boyfriend. You’re too busy dressing like one.”
    I feign sleep, shoving the plugs deeper into my ears until my eardrums burn from the friction. Sasha rummages through drawers then suddenly, I hear her exclaim, “Holy shit! How much money is in here?”
    Right on cue, I jolt up in bed, tossing the pillow aside and yanking the plugs from my ears. In a frantic stupor, I stagger across the room and swipe the envelope from her hands as she gapes incredulously at me.
    “Did you make all of that in tips?” she asks. “Is Frank finally paying you what you deserve? Seriously, I don’t see how you tolerate that job.”
    Sasha Hawthorne has never had a real job. It’d make no sense to waste that kind of time when her father’s a human ATM. Carlson Hawthorne is the co-founder of Hawthorne & Tike Associates—the biggest law firm in our hometown.
    I won’t call the Hawthornes wealthy, but it’d certainly be an insult to call them middle-class. The Hawthornes were always with money. I never saw a day they’d ever had to go without. Some major business merger with a tycoon, Martin Tike elevated the Hawthornes to dirty rich status.
    Sasha—ever the ultimate “daddy’s little girl” cliché—only attends university to busy herself, to keep from having to lounge around the apartment like some dirty rag. When she needs money, Daddy’s only a phone call away. As for the rest of us? Well, I’d be lying if said that Sasha’s carefree, worry-less life doesn’t bug the shit out of me.
    Whenever she complains about Frank or money, she does it because she thinks it’s what normal working-class people do. I usually grit my teeth and nod affably to make her feel like she knows what she talking about. Before moving to Montana (where we met), she predominantly grew up in Connecticut, descending from a family of “old money.”
    We met the summer before sixth grade. She was twelve. I was eleven. The first thing she said to me was how much my clothes stunk. I remember thinking: bitch .
    So I never have a clever comeback to counter her jokes about my lackluster wardrobe. Most of every article of clothing I own is secondhand and purchased from some clearance rack at a bargain bin, hole-in-the-wall department store. Mom mailed some of it in a giant cardboard box one Christmas.
    Seventy percent of it arrived moth-eaten and reeked of mildew as if someone kept them submerged in muddy water for months before handing it over to the local Goodwill station she bought them from. I discarded the holey sweaters, but salvaged the jeans. The mildew stench lingers. Sometimes I can disguise the scent with a spritz of cheap perfume. To this day, nothing has succeeded in completely masking that stench.
    Sasha has never known actual hardship. This isn’t something that I envy her for, not even something I can bring myself to hate her for. It’s not her fault that she stands to inherit more money than I’ll ever make even during a forty-year stretch working at Frank’s .
    “Forget you ever saw this,” I say while stuffing the envelope into my desk drawer. Sasha plops atop my bed and gawks at me with her arms folded, legs crossed, adopting her usual no-bullshit expression.
    I stare at her without speaking. At the long jagged tuft of dirty blonde hair that hangs in front of her eyes. She dyed her hair sixty times throughout high school so many different colors that she’s lost track of her natural shade. The only baby pictures I’ve seen of her seem to reveal that she’s a natural blonde.
    These days, she sports brunette tips with blonde roots because her hair is so fucked up from that last Brazilian blowout that it no longer grows in one uniform length. It’s a mound of seaweed-colored strands.
    “What’s going on?” she asks, one brow cocked inquisitively upward.