Prepare Her by Genevieve Plunkett

Prepare Her by Genevieve Plunkett

Author:Genevieve Plunkett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646220410
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-04-29T00:00:00+00:00


In the morning, the TV was showing a commercial for a breakfast-making machine that could pop out scrambled eggs, or little, perfectly round pancakes. Toby looked at it a long time, wondering how long he’d been awake and why everyone in the commercial was shouting. There was something about their beaming faces that made him uneasy, so he turned the switch and went looking for Sammy, to get ready for school. He remembered the pinball machine halfway down the stairs, the same time as he heard the bells and the ching-chings from below the floorboards.

Doug was always at the factory this time in the morning, unless it was Saturday, which in that case meant no school. If Sammy was at the Hathaways’, then Gram would be waiting in bed for her orange juice. Toby went to the fridge and found the bottle. He shook it and poured it into one of Gram’s plastic cups with the built-in straw. Even as he was walking back upstairs with the juice in his hand, he knew what he was doing must be wrong. But he decided it was just a game, something to be carried out from beginning to end. He went into Gram’s room, stood by the bed, and poured the juice onto the pillow. Back downstairs, Doug was tearing up the kitchen, drawers hanging open, papers and bits of mail scattered everywhere, Doug swinging around like a scarecrow in high winds. He stopped moving when he caught Toby standing in the doorway. He blinked his slow, red eyes.

“What happened to school?” he said. The sun was coming through the window, hard. Toby saw the patterns of dust and fingerprints along the countertops, something that must have always been there, hiding from sight.

“I thought we could make pancakes,” Toby said, not knowing why he was saying it. “I thought we could make them really round this time.”

Doug’s voice was like a drain clogged with hair, getting ready to burble something foul.

“Get your ass to school,” he said.

Outside the wind was tearing through the cornstalks, and farther away, the neighbor’s black cows stood together, still as statues, because there were no flies to swat and there was no fresh grass to eat. Toby ran past the truck and down the driveway, straight down the road—not so much from Doug, but from the pinball machine. There was no way Doug could carry a thing like that. He’d need a truck to move it to the house. Toby remembered the night Doug rolled home with the truck all smashed up. Gram had been madder than ever.

“I want you to look at my face, Douglas!” she yelled. “I want you to see me when I say I will be dead before this family can afford a new truck.”

And now she was and there was no new truck, just that loud, flashing mess in the basement, like it had always been there, waiting for someone to turn it on.

Toby meant to take the road down to the Hathaways’ farm.



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