Free Nowhere Girl by Susan Strecker Page A

was putting on pot holders to pick up the lasagna.
    â€œYou really need to ask him, but I’m sure it has something to do with Emma.”
    David and Brady brought in the lasagna, salad, and bread. But conversation was slow and stilted and mostly focused on Odion’s homemade sauce and how good the french bread was even though carbs were supposedly the root of all evil.
    â€œWe’re usually more fun than this,” I said, glaring at David. “I don’t know what’s wrong with everyone.” I felt like I was on a blind date with someone I had nothing in common with.
    â€œCady-did,” Chandler said. “Don’t you have any trivia from the book world? Dazzle us with some fun literary facts.” His eyes flickered from David back to me.
    I couldn’t think of anything to say. Brady saved me.
    â€œYou know that saying about there being an elephant in the room?” he asked, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
    Oh no, not now. David had been quiet all night. I didn’t know why he was in such a shitty space, but having Brady point it out wasn’t going to help.
    â€œWhat about it?” I said.
    â€œDo you know where that expression came from?”
    â€œI bet you’re going to tell us.” Chandler poured more wine for Brady and then lifted the bottle to me.
    Brady took his wineglass back and smiled, revealing those deep dimples all the high school girls had loved. “Kings in ancient Thailand gave exotic white elephants as gifts to peasants who couldn’t afford to feed them. Instead of telling the king they’d rather be paid with money, they took the gifts without complaint.”
    We all stared at him.
    â€œWhere the hell did you hear that?” David asked.
    Brady dug his fork into the lasagna. “I’m a voracious reader.” He smiled at me. “Now that I know Cady.”
    Brady was mixing his metaphors. An elephant in the room was something that no one wanted to talk about. A white elephant was an unwanted gift. But I wasn’t about to bring that up. I was happy somebody, anybody, was talking.
    â€œDoes anyone know where the phrase raining cats and dogs came from?” I asked.
    David rolled his eyes. “I can see where this is going.”
    â€œWhere?” asked Odion.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “But I really want to.”
    Odion laughed so loud, David had to smile, and Chandler patted my back. Brady lifted his glass to toast us, and I was relieved.
    After finishing dinner and the poached pears and candied walnuts I’d brought but not made, we drank the rest of Brady’s wine during a great game of Fact or Crap. I watched Brady throughout the night, shy at first and then relaxing a bit. I saw him again as a seventeen-year-old kid coming out of fifth period, when I used to pass him on my way to lunch, his books under his arm. Sometimes he’d seem to recognize me, giving me a two-finger salute as though I weren’t a chubby freshman and he wasn’t a high school god.
    After Brady, Chandler, and Odion left, I lingered behind to clean up the kitchen, hoping David would say something about Brady, maybe tell a story about him in high school so I could tell him all the crazy prison trivia he’d given me and how he’d come over for lunch a few times, but he washed the dishes in silence, the kind of quiet I knew not to disturb. When I went to put the wine bottles in the recycling bin in the mudroom, it was overflowing with soda cans and beer bottles.
    â€œYou need to make some room out here,” I called to him.
    He pushed past me, and I watched him try to tear the cardboard of an old pizza box, but it wouldn’t give. The tendons in his neck stood out until finally I grabbed a pair of scissors from the junk drawer in the kitchen, pulled it out of his hands, and cut it in four squares.
    â€œI could have done it,” he said when I was finished.
    I faced him. “What’s up with