Because You Exist(24)
Even I had to admit it was a tad bit weird.
If Josephine wanted to mock it all she kept it to herself. She followed me silently up to my room. If she was any other girl I might have been embarrassed by the state of it, but she wasn’t any other girl. Lucinda, our maid, wasn’t scheduled to come till Sunday. I always found some way to create a war zone in my room before her visits. Now it was covered with dirty clothes and empty fast food bags. Jenna never liked to hang out at my house, so I never felt a need to keep my room clean. She didn’t particularly enjoy my uncle’s company. My uncle didn’t have any tact, and Jenna always thought out her words carefully.
“Nice room,” Josephine said dully.
“Thanks. The bathroom is over here. If you want to go get cleaned up. I’ll find you something to wear.”
“Try and find something clean. I’m not really down with smelling like whatever goes on in this room.”
At least she was acting a little more like herself.
When I heard the bathroom door close I began to rummage through my closest. What does one wear after shooting someone in the chest? Settling on an old Shepherd Middle School t-shirt I found in the corner of my closest, a shirt I wouldn’t mind never getting back, I waited for Josephine to get done.
When I heard the shower turn on I took a seat on my bed. I wouldn’t be a male if my mind didn’t momentarily wander to thinking about the fact that there was a girl naked in my shower. Jenna had never even used my shower. But I only thought about this for a moment.
When the shower turned off I waited by the bathroom door, the old t-shirt in my hand. The door cracked open and an arm shot out. I placed the t-shirt in her waiting hand. After clutching onto it, Josephine slammed the door shut and I heard it lock.
Like I would try and go in there.
After a few more minutes, Josephine appeared. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. Her face was flushed from the warm water. The t-shirt fit a little snugly against her chest. And I was staring. And she caught me staring. Josephine frowned and pulled Jenna’s sweatshirt back over her head.
“Your bathroom is disgusting. I mean really disgusting. You need a shower to clean yourself up from taking a shower in that bathroom,” said Josephine.
“Thanks. It takes a lot of effort to create a natural disaster in one’s own home,” I replied.
“There’s nothing natural about what’s going on in there,” she countered.
“So...we going to talk about it?” I was starting to become a little uncomfortable with Josephine hanging out in my room.
“Talk about what?” she asked.
The fact that you killed a man.
Josephine moved to take a seat at my desk, lifting up a crumpled issue of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit issue so she could sit down in the chair. “I don’t want to know how this magazine got like this,” she said, holding the magazine towards me by the corner.
“Ha. Funny,” I replied, snatching it from her hand and throwing it over my shoulder.
Josephine let free a sigh. “You wanted to talk about something?”
Was she really going to pretend like the whole thing didn’t happen?
“This is really the most disgusting room I have ever seen, and I’m a foster kid.”
Yes. She was.
“How the hell do you know how to shoot a gun?” I finally asked, frustrated by how she was forcing me to bring up the horror of what happened to us.
Josephine pulled her hands inside the long sleeves of Jenna’s sweatshirt. “My father taught me.”
“I thought your father was in jail?”
“He is. He taught me when I was little.”
“Like how little?”
Josephine laughed bitterly. “Real little. I hated it too. I was sick a lot when I was little. Spent time at the hospital. I can’t tell you how much of my time I spent watching cartoons and Disney movies.”
“I don’t really remember you being absent a lot,” I admitted.
“I don’t think I was your favorite recess buddy in elementary school, Logan.”
True.
“When I was about four my father got really into guns. He took me along with him hunting. I cried every time. I kept seeing him kill Bambi or one of the creatures from Sleeping Beauty. One day he got sick of my whining. He forced the gun in my hand and made me shoot. That’s how it went for years. He was brilliant when it came to hunting. And the more I resisted taking part, the more he killed. So, I started learning how to shoot. At least while he was teaching me he wasn’t killing every little Thumper he saw.”
The story was kinda sick. I mean it would never make it on ABC Family. Most unsettling was the way in which Josephine told it; she told the story like it was nothing out of the ordinary. I wondered exactly how screwed up her childhood had been.