The Ordinary Haunting II

20. New and the Peaceful Apples

Tay called that time my 'Peace Enough to Eat Apples' time. It was exactly as it sounds.

Since well before Ma passed – I guess since the end of high school when Pa cursed me out for not wanting the orchard and "fucking off to the city to do an Arts degree" – I hadn't voluntarily picked up an apple for five or six years. The red ones looked like Pa's cheeks in the winter, the green ones like the moss stuck to his boots, the yellow ones like his gloves thrown over my head to get my attention when I was playing with graphs on my TI-84 calculator. But in the week that Off was pissed at Tay, I ate eleven apples. More than one a day. On Wednesday I ate three. Wednesday was my music lesson day, when Earth and I usually worked on a sappy song with few chords, and Tay would always burst in towards the end of the hour looking like he'd been waiting outside the door for much longer. But that Wednesday Earth cancelled to look after his sick brother, and Tay stayed home to strategise a plan of attack with Arm or something, so I ate three apples out of sheer boredom.

According to Pluem, Doe had insisted on sending them to me, and after staring at them long enough, instead of my middling father I saw my niece. Her rosy cheeks in the mornings, her favourite socks with the snake eyes on the toes, her daffodil hair ties. I blamed Tay of course. As a journalist I'd always been taught to seek more information beyond the obvious facts of something, but if I had to make a blatant metaphor of things, it would be that I was trained to dig up a plant's roots while Tay had learned to peek between the flowers.

Or had decided to approach it that way himself, more likely, and no-one would ever object to that. People rarely objected to anything Tay did. I too let him decide a lot of things, I'd realised. He kind of had that right, as a straight-up good guy (completely regardless of being a mostly-dead guy). When he decided to tell Off, Arm, Alice and Gun that he and I were dating after-all as the six of us lied around half-drunk and still arguing about the most efficient way to mime Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, I didn't think of stopping it. I heard the words and then the silence, and there was nothing more – or less – to say about it. We were dating, there was no reason Tay's friends couldn't know it, and me being wary of Off's reaction in particular was stupid. And selfish. I'd warned Tay, but perhaps that was better served as a warning to myself: Don't be selfish. If Tay, with eyes like I'd seen on the couch that night, could agree to hold himself back for my sake, I could agree to let some things go for his.

Hence why, in a large half-circle of a process, I came to decide to just eat the damn apples Doe had sent me. Because I was dating a good guy, and good guys' boyfriends shouldn't hate their lonely fathers.

Or should at the very least should love their nieces more than that.

"Tawan?"

A car horn blared into the steamy afternoon air. The day had been sunny and warm, and the concrete of the city had started to sweat now that the wetness of an incoming storm was sticking to it. Waiting at an intersection, our usual group minus Gun all turned our heads to look down the road on our left. Joss, Mint and Namtan were waving, the three of them in identical white T-shirts and blue denim overalls. They even had their hair tied in pigtails, Joss included. Along with his black face mask and sunglasses, he was almost unrecognisable. I figured I'd recommend the get-up to Mild the next time she complained about getting caught by fans at the supermarket while trying to buy sanitary napkins.

"Hey!" Tay shouted in reply. He swept his black hair off his forehead and the orange sun filtered hazily over his skin like mist. Because it wasn't actually hitting him and was instead just sort of passing through, the light kept its translucent quality. I felt the point of Arm's elbow noogie affectionately into my rib, and raised my phone to find something else to look at. Hello, stock market, old tempestuous friend.