Free Need by Carrie Jones

Tomorrow?”
    Betty perks up and starts hustling around, taking dishes off the table.
    “Say yes,” she whispers.
    “I have to go register my car tomorrow,” I say, which I do.
    “Oh,” Ian says.
    “I’m sorry.”
    Betty yanks the faucet to turn on the hot water and groans.
    “I could come with you,” Ian says.
    “To the DMV?” I am stunned.
    “Yeah. It’s boring as hell in there, but it’s better with someone else.”
    “Sure. Okay.” I don’t know what to say. “If you don’t mind.”
    We hang up and Betty asks me who it was.
    “This guy named Ian that I met at school. He wants to go to the DMV with me.”
    She hands me a plate to dry. “Well, there’s true love.”
    I snort.
    She says, “He’s the Ian who is a runner, right? The point guard of the basketball team?”
    “I don’t know. I know he runs and he’s in a ton of clubs.”
    “Classic overachiever. He comes from an old Bedford family. His father lobsters. His grandfather logged. They have hardly anything: live in a glorified shack, basically. It’s amazing to see what that boy has done.”
    While I rub the plate with a dish towel, I think about Ian and all his clubs and all his energy. “Yeah.” “And he’s obviously got good taste if he already has his eye set on you.” She points at me with a fork. I put the plate away and grab the fork from her.
    “He’s just being helpful.” “Ha. Right.”

    [ * ]

    I wake up in the middle of the night. There’s a noise downstairs, soft tapping across the floor. I grab the big metal flashlight that’s next to the bed and slip out from under the covers. I don’t turn the flashlight on, though. I grab it like cops do, ready to bash someone over the head. I tiptoe down the stairs and that’s when I see her, Betty, standing by the front windows.
    Her body is fierce, tight, strong. She looks like an Olympic athlete, a warrior, not a grammy.
    “Betty?” I whisper her name, afraid to startle her. She motions for me to come all the way down, I stand next to her, peering into the darkness. “What are you looking for?” I whisper. “Things in the night.”
    “Do you see anything?” She laughs. “No.”
    She pulls me against her and kisses the top of my head. “You go on up to bed. I’ve got everything under control.”
    I walk away a step and stop. “Gram? Are you really looking for things in the night?”
    “People are always looking into the dark, Zara. We’re afraid of what we might see. It might be the dark outside, it might be the dark of our own souls, but I figure it’s better to get caught looking than to never know. You get me?”
    “Not really.”
    She steps away from the window, pushes me toward the stairs, “Go to bed. School tomorrow. Okay?” “Okay.”

Couplogagophobia
fear of being the third wheel
    That night I dream about my dad, all night long. He’s standing at the end of Betty’s driveway. It’s snowing. There are giant paw prints on the snow. His mouth is open and moving, but no sound comes out.
    I make myself wake up. The room is cold. The wind blows tree branches against the house, making scraping noises. I turn on the lamp next to the bed, trying not to freak out.
    “It’s just a dream,” I whisper, but the truth is that when my dad died, his mouth moved and no sound ever came out.
    When my dad died, we had just come in from our daily morning run. We always ran before breakfast, before the Charleston heat overwhelmed us and made running too much effort. We were talking about gay marriage. He was the one who got me started on writing letters for Amnesty International. I was maybe in first grade, complaining about writing being boring and stupid and a waste of my six-year-old time, and he sat me down at the dining room table and told me stories about people who were suffering. He told me writing was never a waste of time, and that’s when I wrote my first letter.
    But when he died, we weren’t talking about Amnesty, we were talking about his friends