Evvie Drake Starts Over

by Linda Holmes

Every year, a room full of people gathered, without knowing it, to eat roasted chicken, honor Tim’s ego, and applaud the way his parents loved him so much that over and over, they had made him worse.

It’s a fuckin’ polite way of saying ‘crashed so hard you left a crater they turned into a swimming hole.’

Oh, that’s right, she thought. I remember having good days.

She put three drops of an eye serum under each eye, because eye skin was apparently not made of regular skin,

“It’s only the first day.” “Of what?” he asked. “You know,” she said. “Whatever.”

Here were the stairs where she had slipped two weeks before Tim died and put a big bruise on her hip. She fell; she wasn’t pushed. She wasn’t hit, she wasn’t punched. But she was hurrying down the stairs in her socks on the way to her hideout only because she was so tired of listening to him yell, so, as she said only to herself, you tell me.

“Evvie, I can’t get over how great your house is,” Monica said, grabbing the conversational wheel and pulling as hard as she could away from the ditch as the tires squealed.

the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry,

“I mean, Ev, if you wait long enough, something terrible is always going to happen. But I don’t think that’s because you try to be happy, you know?