Free Random Acts Of Crazy by Julia Kent Page A

joist, plywood, and a lot of really hokey, propped up things that kept the bed up. An old memory foam roll, and strangely enough, a down comforter, had come from the small college about half an hour away where my uncle had gone – not Mama’s brother, but daddy’s brother.
    A long time ago, Josie had told me that if you go to the colleges after the May term ended, you could find some really awesome stuff – and she’d been right. If my Toyota weren’t so small, I would have filled it with much more but at least I got this, right?
    I had enough money to buy a couple of things for nice and cheap at yard sales and the Goodwill. That’s how I acquired the coffee maker, my table, some kitchen utensils, a few pots and pans. The real coup had been that dorm fridge. It had taken two years of searching the dumpsters at the local college, but I’d finally found one that worked.
    And now I had my own little home. Mama didn’t mind if I ran an extension cord through the window to give me some electricity. That had been good enough.
    Nobody knew what I had made out here. Not even Mama – I wouldn’t let her in. She probably couldn’t walk all the way over, anyhow. Walking had been hard enough with her foot missing, but then the weight that had gathered with time, turning her into a different person altogether, like moss overtaking a roof until it is the only thing holding it up.
    This was the real me. That’s right – this room, this little thing. This is where I went to escape all the shit from people like Davey, where I listened to Trevor over and over again, to his beautiful naked voice. Not just him – I had other favorites, like the Parlotones, Thermal and a Quarter, and other weird-ass shit that nobody in this little town had ever heard of but me. So it was all mine. It was mine the same way that a lot of my memories I didn’t talk about were mine.
    And now Trevor really was mine, at least until his friend came and took him away. Until he went back to whatever world he lived in that was so alien from mine. Mama had called Trevor the alien, wrapped in silver, and so had Davey – but they were wrong. They were wrong.
    I was the alien. A long time ago, I had accepted that.
    So if I was an alien and Trevor was an alien then it was time for two aliens to get funky.
    “I hope you’re not expecting fancy,” I informed Trevor as I finished cooking eggs and slid them onto one of my two plates. I had no appetite, so I wasn’t going to bother, but I handed it to him with a fork and he dug into it as if I had given him caviar and filet mignon.
    “Oh, my God,” he groaned.
    “That bad?” I said, flinching.
    “Oh, Darla. This is unbelievable. What is in this?”
    He ate half the plate before I could open my mouth to answer. “It’s just eggs and some cream and a bunch of cheese and some ham and…I don’t know, a little garlic, tarragon, and some pepper.”
    “It’s like something from Top Chef,” he said.
    “Now you’re just flattering me.”
    He flashed me a comfortable, saucy grin, the kind of look that you give someone you have been with for a while, someone who can read your signals, who can know from the slightest fold in the skin around your eyes whether you’re having a good day or a bad day. Whether you want to be fucked or be made love to. Whether you want to be alone, or to cry on their shoulder.
    And then he said, “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
    “Well,” I said, stalling for a little time, my heart and my throat and my eyes welling up with some deep uprising of emotion that I had no right to own. “I have a secret to tell you, Trevor,” I said, walking over.
    He was sitting up on the edge of my bed, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his head bent over the plate. He stopped eating and looked up at me, again with a half smile of something intimate and more than just sex – or maybe I was just reading that. I have a tendency to do that.
    “I’m a sure thing,” I whispered inches from