Free Happily Ever Madder: Misadventures of a Mad Fat Girl by Stephanie McAfee Page B

members, all of whom have just taken a keen interest in the papers in front of them. “Roger! I said that you have to have the board’s permission to speak! You can’t just come up here and—”
    Roger stops and stares at her, then looks over at the board members. “Who has a problem with me doing this?” No one looks up at Roger.
    “This is not necessary!” Cindy wails.
    “Yes, it is, Cindy, because it’s your cat and it’s been pissing in my carport for months and it just started pissing in my car and it’s going to stop before I kill the damn thing!”
    “Roger, you wouldn’t! I’ll sue you!” she hisses, and I can feel the tension in the room thicken into a fog. The man to my left is now wide-awake and watching with great interest.
    “Well, you’ve got me scared now, Cindy,” Roger says and keeps typing. “You think I can’t afford to replace a cat?”
    “Roger,” Margo says, grabbing for the computer. “I won’t have this foolishness! I’m the president of this association, and you have to have my approval before you present anything at these meetings.”
    Roger pulls the computer to the side, just out of Margo’s reach. “Margo, you own one house, not the entire goddamned neighborhood. So step back and shut the hell up for a minute!”
    “You will not continue using language like that at this meeting!” Margo shouts. Furious, she looks down at Liam, who appears to be sniggering. His face straightens and he gets pale when he sees Margo staring at him.
    “Oh, Cindy,” Board Member Number Three says, “I do believe that is Pebbles.”
    Cindy looks at the projection screen, sees her cat prancing around on the hood of Roger’s vintage Corvette, and gasps. “Turn that off, Roger! We’ve seen enough!”
    “No, let’s just watch this for a minute longer.”
    “Roger,” a man in the back yells, “we get it. It’s Margo’s cat. Can we move on, please?”
    “No, Mike, we can’t,” Roger says, glaring at him.
    Mike sighs and we all sit quietly and watch Pebbles prance around on Roger’s car. It’s starting to get pretty dull, but then someone appears on the right side of the screen. I can see only the back of her head at first because she’s skulking like a robber.
    “Who is that?” Mike asks.
    “You’ll see,” Roger answers.
    The figure walks up to the car and starts laying down a line of something I can’t make out, but Pebbles obviously likes it, because she’s eating it up. The perpetrator starts at the front of the hood and goes all the way up the windshield, then drops a piece of cat goody into the seat of the Corvette. She turns around, and several people in the room gasp in surprise when Cindy gets so close to the camera that we can see the moles on her face. I look at Cindy and then at Margo, both of whom are staring at the screen in total horror, having no choice but to sit and watch Cindy toss cat treats all over Roger’s pristine Corvette. Pebbles jumps back and forth between the seats, and the audio is sketchy, but everyone in the room can make out Cindy saying, “Pee-pee, Pebbles! Pee-pee! Good girl!” Roger is glaring at Cindy; then everyone gasps again when Pebbles hunches up and pisses in the passenger seat.
    “Hey, I found some cat food in my seat the other day,” another dog owner says. “Was that you, Cindy?”
    “No,” she says, “of course not! That’s not me! I wouldn’t do such a thing.”
    “Uh, it’s pretty obvious that it is you, Cindy,” Mike calls from the back of the room. “You stand up there bitching about uneven grass and open mailboxes and then here you are throwing cat food into Roger’s Corvette. Really? These meetings are such a waste of time.”
    “Roger, you doctored this video!” Cindy yells. “You must be following me and filming me in secret and using the images to create false videos with all of that media crap you have in your house that’s probably illegal!”
    “Shut up, Cindy,” Roger says.
    “What I get from