Free The Last Forever by Deb Caletti Page B

“My dear,” just like you think old people do. “It was a pleasure to meet you.” But then she crooks her finger, and I lean down. “Don’t let it bother you,” she whispers. “Those two think their you-know-what doesn’t stink.”
    *  *  *
    I’m on a roll. Jenny will get the wrong idea of me now, because I’m trashing her students, whom I just met. Generally, I’m an open-minded person. A benefit-of-the-doubt-giving person. Death has made me easily fed up.
    “Would it kill them to be friendly? Could you get your nose higher in the air? I mean, why does she even take the class if she doesn’t like it?”
    “I think she likes it a lot. Terminally bored is just her way of being in the world.”
    “Her way of being superior in the world! And what’s with the two of them, anyway? They seem awfully close. Close-close. Hey, I read my mother’s old copy of Flowers in the Attic. ”
    “It’s nothing personal, Tess,” Jenny says. “You have to remember, hundreds and hundreds of tourists visit during the summer. They go on their whale-watching tours and stay in our B and Bs and then they go home and we all go about our regular lives. You don’t expect to bond .”
    “ ‘We,’ ‘they,’ ” I say. My voice sounds too sarcastic, even to me. But I don’t like her tone either. Or maybe I don’t like that she’s joining them in “we” and leaving me all alone out here.
    She holds up a hand. She actually steps away from me. “I’m not your enemy.”
    “Could have fooled me.”
    Jenny gives me a long stare, the kind Mr. Shattuck used to give the mouthy potheads in Algebra II. We’re still in her studio, and she heads over to her desk and starts shuffling stuff around, as if she’s done with this conversation. She puts on the glasses she wears on a chain around her neck and studies a small stack of glossy photos of what looks like her own art. Well, sure. Of course she’s loyal to these people. This is her life. She’s known me, her own flesh and blood, all of five minutes.
    This is not going the way I expected. Jenny is obviously not the fountain of grandmotherly love and understanding I thought she might be. And she is not bowing at the altar of my grief like she’s supposed to either. Her jaw is a granite slab, immoveable and almost defiant. It’s Dad’s look. It’s my own; I hate to admit it. We’re a generally optimistic lot, but we’re fond of our own views, let’s just say. Sure of our own position. “Stubborn” is another word for it.
    Well, my mother was too. She and my father could face off like a pair of boulders.
    “I’d like to get out of here, if I’m allowed,” I say.
    She opens her desk drawer, grabs her keys, and tosses them to me. In the film version, I catch them neatly and stride off, with my hair flowing out behind me and my shoes clip-clip ping their displeasure. In real life, she makes a bad throw, and Imake a worse catch, and the keys go sliding across the floor and I have to retrieve them from under Cora Lee’s abandoned chair.
    “There you go, Rapunzel,” she says. “First gear sticks.”
    It’s official: I hate it here.

chapter seven
Sesamum indicum : sesame. The sesame seed is one of the oldest spices known to man. The most famous reference to sesame seeds came in the tale of Ali Baba and his forty thieves. “Open sesame” was the magic password, which unlocked the door to the robbers’ den. The phrase was used because ripe sesame pods are so delicate that they can burst open and scatter their seeds at the slightest touch. Call them overly sensitive.
    Inside the house, I grab my purse. I swipe the piece of paper with my father’s number on it and tuck it into my pocket. I want to go home. Vito hears the keys jingle and thinks we’re going somewhere.
    “See you later, alligator,” I say to him.
    But I say this sort of meanly. Sorry, Vito, but I feel the sort of pissed that makes you want to step down hard on the accelerator, and when I do, the