SEVEN
Record
“I can’t believethat you tipped me over,” Gavin says with a laugh as we duck under one of the bay doors of his mechanic shop.
“It was only fair. I got wet, so you should have been too,” I tell him and he grins at me.
“You got wet because a wave tipped your kayak over, not because I tipped you over,” he reminds me and I try to hide my smile.
“Semantics.”
He laughs and passes me my tote bag.
“Want me to throw your towel in the wash with mine?”
“No, that’s okay. I can do laundry when I get back to Madelyn’s place. I’ll just hang it up somewhere to dry for now.”
“Here,” he says, taking the towel and heading into the lobby.
I watch him as he starts to hang up our wet stuff and smile. Today was the most fun that I’ve had in a really long time. Maybe ever.
My phone buzzes in the tote bag that Gavin bought me at some little store near the beach. I have to fish around inside and when I finally grab it and see the screen, I’m starting to wish that I had brought it kayaking with us and it had fallen overboard.
There are over thirty missed calls from my family. I’m surprised to see that over half of them are from my younger sister. She never calls me unless she needs something, and I wonder if something bad happened.
Oh god, what if someone died or was in an accident? They could be in the hospital and I’m over here gallivanting all over town and drooling over some hot guy.
I’m just about to call her back when I notice the text messages.
There are over a hundred of them, and my heart races as I start to read. I’m expecting them to be letting me know that someone was hurt or passed away and asking me to come home, but that’s not what I get.
Instead, it’s message after message of them accusing me of ruining their lives and demanding that I return home.
They need my money to afford the mortgage and they were using my car to get around town. Now they’re down to two, and my sister has been bugging my parents for rides to work or to borrow the car to go out with her friends and my parents stand it. They want me to buy her a new car. It’s the least that I can do for messing up their lives and cursing everyone.
My stomach hollows at the familiar words and I start to feel numb.
They’ve been telling me some version of that sentiment for my entire life, and I guess I never questioned them. I mean, they’re my parents after all and I just always trusted them and what they said. I’m sure that there’s some psychological reasoning behind why victims blame themselves, and I wonder if I could ask Gavin’s dad to explain it to me, but at the end of the day, I still believed it for over twenty-three years.
I think that Gavin was right.
I’m not cursed. There’s no such thing as curses.
We make our own luck, and my parents and sister have always taken the easy road. They don’t need to work hard or try for things. Not when they can fail, blame it on me, and then demand that I do something to make it up to them.
“I’m not a curse,” I whisper to myself, my eyes stinging with tears.
“I know. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Gavin says softly from behind me and I hurry to dry my eyes before I turn to face him.
“My family has been texting and calling me,” I tell him, passing him my phone.
I watch as he reads a few messages in the group chat, his features darkening and his fingers tightening with each new message that he reads.
“They’re wrong. You don’t owe them shit,” he promises me, a fire burning bright in his eyes.
“I know. I’m starting to see that after today.”
“Good.”