Free Velvet by Temple West

“What birthday party?”
    “Joe and I were thinking you might want to have one here, and invite some school friends.”
    I poured creamer into my mug. “No, thanks.”
    I could feel the tension radiating off Rachel in waves. Or maybe that was my tension, it was hard to tell these days.
    “Okay, well, have you at least thought about what you want? It’s coming up pretty soon here.”
    I froze. For a second, for a split second, she’d sounded just like my mom. Or, like my mom a year ago, before her voice had gotten hoarse and raspy from intubation tubes and chemo. Rachel was her younger sister—her prettier sister. After my dad died, my mom had gotten slowly larger every year, then dramatically thinned out when she got sick. She was never really beautiful, but by the end she was downright scary to look at, with bags of loose skin pooling through the sleeves of her hospital gown and her head all dry and bald. Even with those differences, it was impossible to look at Rachel and not see her.
    But my mom wouldn’t have had to ask me what I wanted for my birthday. She would have driven me to our local craft store where we knew every employee by name. She would have handed me a cart and told me to pick out anything I wanted. I’d usually get a couple yards of a fabric I couldn’t normally afford, or stock up on zippers, needles, elastics, pins, bobbins, seam rippers (I always managed to lose mine), pattern paper, backing, or any of the other thousand and one things you need to have a fully functional workshop. My freshman year, she’d surprised me with my own sewing machine—it was expensive enough that it had doubled as my Christmas present, but I didn’t care because it was the best thing I’d ever been given in my entire life, and it meant that much more because it drove home just how much my mom knew me, better than anyone. Rachel, though—she had no idea what to do with me.
    I slowly put the spoon into my mug and stirred, trying to stay calm. “I’m all good on the birthday front. Thanks, though.”
    Even from here I could see a vein beating in her temple as she struggled to keep her smile in place. “Come on, it’s your golden birthday! It’s not every day you turn seventeen on the seventeenth!”
    “I don’t need anything,” I replied a little more sharply than I’d meant.
    “Well, that’s fine, because birthdays are about receiving things you want .” She wasn’t going to give up. “So what do you want?”
    I turned to face her so fast that coffee sloshed over the rim and burned my fingers, but I didn’t care. “I don’t want anything from you.” I’d said it quietly, but my voice was shaking.
    “Caitlin, I know it’s hard now that your mom’s gone—”
    “ No —” I interrupted her, “you don’t get to give me that talk. You don’t get to pretend like you knew anything about her.”
    I knew I should stop, but after weeks of trying to choke it all down, I could feel it racing uncontrollably toward the surface.
    “You weren’t there,” I said evenly, although my face was flushed red and it felt a billion degrees warmer than it had a second ago. “You didn’t sleep for weeks in a chair by her bed. You didn’t show up at the cemetery to pay your respects, you weren’t there to help Grandma with the funeral arrangements or the medical bills or the service, you didn’t even come to Mystic to help me pack up my stuff to move to your shitty town.” I heard footsteps pause on the stairs, but I didn’t care if Norah heard. “Just to be clear, I don’t want to be here. My mom didn’t want me to be here. So when I say that I don’t want anything for my birthday, I don’t fucking want anything for my birthday.”
    She blinked, mouth trembling, then set her mug on the counter and walked out of the kitchen.
    Adrian had great timing—I could hear the hum of the Harley coming down the driveway. Abandoning my coffee, I grabbed my backpack and ran out the door. The bike was still