Everything's Relative Read online

  Money? Please. Six million dollars wasn’t money; it was freedom. It was never again having to stress about bills or student loans or saving for the future. It was no longer tossing and turning every night worrying about her sisters or wondering if she’d get a call from the cops or the hospital or both. It was the family she and Shawn desperately wanted to start—but only when they were sure they could give their children everything they never had, from cars on their sixteenth birthdays to prepaid tuition to the colleges of their choice. Jules had read online that babies go through an average of eighty dollars in diapers alone every month. Eighty bucks! Not to mention food and clothes and toys and everything else they needed—or that the clever marketers made you think they needed, at any rate. With a few million in the bank, she could finally relax and splurge a little on herself. She could buy a fancy stroller like the ones she saw the cute young moms pushing around the mall. The eight hundred dollars the popular day-care center charged every month for full-time care would be couch change. Which was ironic, seeing as she wouldn’t need full-time care because she’d no longer be working around the clock.

  Was there a book idea there? Something about a mom . . . or a baby . . . or somebody buying a diaper company? Jules sat at her keyboard, her fingers hovering at the ready in their proper positions, but nothing came.

  Maybe she just needed to do some research, get inspired. Jules thought about the sitcoms she and Shawn watched; wasn’t each twenty-three-minute episode a mini story of its own? She could just watch a bunch of them and then steal one of the plotlines, which wasn’t really stealing because at the end of the day, how many stories were there to be told in the world? People rewrote and modernized classics all the time. Bridget Jones’s Diary was Pride and Prejudice; The Lion King was Hamlet; My Fair Lady was Pygmalion. Writing was more than putting words on paper; there were ideas and inspiration to consider. Just because she hadn’t yet found her muse didn’t mean she wasn’t working.

  Jules poured herself a cup of coffee, which was now ice cold. She nuked it for a full minute and then dumped in several spoonfuls of sugar and a generous helping of milk. It was lukewarm and bitter, but she drank it anyway. The effect of this was that she was wide awake and jittery all day as she watched TV and completely forgot that she was supposed to be looking for a plot.

  Brooke

  Brooke shot straight up in bed and looked at her phone. Four thirty? Who was calling her at four thirty in the morning? Then she remembered: It was her alarm. She was supposed to go for a run, which would surely be more like a walk. Her heart pounding, she tentatively felt around in the bed; at least Jake hadn’t come home. She shuddered to think of the outrage that would rain down if she’d dared to disturb his precious sleep.

  Two hours later, Brooke heard the sounds of birds chirping in the distance. She peeled her eyelids open and reached for her phone. Six thirty-five. Cripes. She’d fallen back asleep, missed her workout, and was supposed to be at work in fifteen minutes.

  “Shoot, shoot, shoot,” she mumbled, flying out of bed and scrambling around the room for her clothes. Good thing she hadn’t exercised, because there was no time for a shower. Fortunately everything she owned was a solid color and pretty much went with everything else, so she grabbed a skirt and top and some shoes and quickly ran a brush through her thick, wavy hair. Then she raced to the kitchen and pulled a bag of gummy bears from the cabinet, indelicately stuffing a fistful into her mouth. She could brush her teeth when she got home. She shoved the bag of candy into her purse, grabbed her keys and raced out the door.

  It wasn’t until the noon bell rang that she remembered she’d forgotten to bring a lunch.

  “Want half of my sandwich?” Pam offered, holding up a turkey on wheat.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Brooke said, thinking she could sneak into the art room and eat her gummy bears.

  “Really, I never finish it all anyway,” Pam insisted. Brooke finished her lunch every single day. Always. And she was still starving when she got home. Pam must be some sort of genetic mutant, that was all there was to it.

  “If you don’t mind, that would be great,” Brooke said gratefully, wondering if she had ever not finished a meal in her life. “I can bring lunch for both of us tomorrow.” And when I’m rich, she added in her head, I’ll bring us lunch every day, I promise. She couldn’t tell Pam about her mom’s will, and she certainly couldn’t tell her about the ridiculous conditions. Pam would probably suggest they start running stadium steps after work or something crazy like that, and then when would Brooke get to catch up on her favorite reality TV? No, it was definitely best to keep the whole inheritance nightmare under tight wraps.

  When she got home from work, Brooke was even hungrier than usual. She knew she should go for a run, but food was fuel, after all. She’d run much harder and farther if she had something in her stomach. She made a beeline for the fridge and pulled out the leftover chicken-fried steak she’d made two nights before.

  “I was just about to eat that,” Jake announced. He’d been playing video games when she’d gotten home and had barely looked up to say hello. He must have been there awhile, as he had clearly worked up quite an appetite.

  “Well, now you’re not because I’m starving and I got here first,” Brooke told him. She didn’t usually talk back to him, but she was hungry and cranky.

  “Yeah, you really look like you’re starving,” Jake said, still absorbed in his game. “What the hell am I supposed to eat?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure you can figure something out,” Brooke said, stinging from the insult. He could eat rat poison for all she cared. She had shopped for the food, she’d paid for the food, she’d cooked the food, and now she wanted to eat the food. She was pretty sure she was well within her rights to do so.

  “Where’s your purse?” Jake asked, throwing the game controller aside angrily and leaping to his feet. He was wearing the Santa Claus pajama bottoms she’d bought for him last Christmas and a ripped Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and Brooke wasn’t sure which looked crazier: his outfit or his eyes.

  “On the hook,” she told him.

  “Why don’t you get it for me?”

  “Why don’t you get a job?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you find somewhere else to live?” he countered. She watched as he snatched her purse off the hook and pulled the lone ten-dollar bill from her wallet.

  “I’m taking your car,” he announced, grabbing her keys and shoving his feet into the pair of flip-flops he always left by the door. “I’m out of gas.” She was about to point out his clothes but he slammed out the front door before she could get the words out. It served him right.

  Brooke popped the chicken into the microwave, then she pulled the cottage cheese container from the back of the fridge. She dumped the contents into a bowl, congratulating herself on the clever decoy. She knew Jake wouldn’t touch that tub unless he was actually starving to death, so her chocolate-covered almonds were perfectly safe. They were even better cold, she thought now, as she shoveled them into her mouth with a spoon.

  By the time she finished her steak, Brooke was too stuffed to move. Clearly there was going to be a learning curve with this whole becoming-an-athlete-again plan.

  That’s when she had an epiphany: Obviously she couldn’t train for a half-marathon, break up with her boyfriend and change her entire living situation at the same time. It was too stressful. The breakup would be quick—as soon as she got up the nerve to do it—and she was positive she could find an affordable place to live in a month or two, three max. Then she’d have nine months to work up to running thirteen lousy miles. That was more than doable. She could do it in half that time, no problem.

  Brooke celebrated having come up with a perfectly reasonable plan with a beer and the rest of the chocolate-covered almonds.

  Lexi

  “Are you going to answer that damned thing or not?” Ryan asked. “I ca
n’t take it anymore.”

  “Word,” added Brad.

  “Why does it matter if I answer it or not? It still makes the same sound.” Even as buzzed as she was, Lexi was pretty sure this was an airtight argument.

  “Yeah, but it stresses me out,” Ryan said. He was chopping a rock of coke into a fine powder on the side of her hand mirror that wasn’t cracked.

  “Me, too,” Brad agreed.

  “It stresses you out? You guys are so fucked up,” Lexi said. She stretched her long legs out on the coffee table. It had been there when she moved in and was an ugly, beat-up mess. When nobody currently in residence claimed ownership of the thing, she’d found some paint in a storage closet and given it a makeover. There hadn’t been much of a paint selection, so she’d used purple as the base and then painted a giant red cannabis leaf in the middle. It had looked great when she was finished, too, but now it was scuffed and covered in burn marks. Oh well. That was what happened when you lived with a bunch of slobs.

  The Pad, as their house was known, could accommodate as many as ten people at a time, so it may as well have had a revolving door for roommates. At the moment, Ryan and Brad were the only two who weren’t gay or uptight assholes and also liked to sit around and get high as often as possible. They were like brothers to Lexi. Well, if you didn’t count the fact that she occasionally slept with both of them.

  Lexi looked at her phone. Jules, of course. Her pain-in-the-ass sister had been calling her every day and leaving these annoying chirpy messages. “Just checking in! How’s the job search going? Let me know if I can do anything to help!” Lexi fumed every time she heard one of them. Of course Jules wanted to help her now, when there was something in it for her. Where had she been the last fifteen years, that’s what Lexi wanted to know. Her oldest sister had moved out of the house the day after she graduated high school, leaving her sisters with Juliana the Terrible. Lexi had been just twelve, although she had looked and acted much older. By that point she had already discovered boys and booze and pot, and she used all of them to escape the hell that was her life at home. Juliana’s increasingly overbearing posture seemed to multiply when Jules left and she could only divide her intrusive attention by two. Lexi had had to be incredibly sneaky about it all, which to her had been the best part. She knew that her mom suspected she was doing something she shouldn’t be, and Lexi savored the feeling of having something all her own, something her mother couldn’t control.

  “Hey, Slexis,” Brad said now. He couldn’t remember “Alexis” to save his life, but “Slexis” he had no problem with. “Don’t forget we need a buck-fifty for rent. Bump?” He wiped his nose on his sleeve and offered her the mirror.

  “Fuck,” she said, taking the mirror. Blow wasn’t her favorite, but Lexi wasn’t one to turn down a free buzz. “I think I’ve got like ninety. Maybe you guys could cover me? I’ll pay you back.” She licked her full lips suggestively. That was almost always all it took.

  The guys shrugged. “Sure, okay,” Brad said. “That cool, Ry?” Ryan nodded.

  Lexi sat back, feeling proud that she’d figured out how to take care of herself. Certainly no adult had ever taught her. The guys would be happy to fork over the sixty bucks she was short if she let them screw her a few times. She could wait disgusting tables at the Salty Dog all night and not make half that much. Besides, they were her friends and she didn’t really mind, especially since it hardly ever took either of them longer than two minutes to get the job done. If she was actually getting paid, that would translate into a few hundred bucks an hour. Lexi was pretty sure whatever “actual job” she got to please her dead mother wouldn’t pay anywhere close to that.

  Jules

  Jules stepped out of the shower and pulled the damp towel that Shawn had just used off the hook. She’d been fourteen the time Juliana had yelled at her and called her selfish for taking the last dry towel, and she’d never done it again. She couldn’t. Jules wondered now if there were people in the world who took a fresh, dry towel every single time they showered. She’d bet there were, and she wondered still if she would ever feel like she deserved to be one of them.

  “I won’t be home until after midnight tonight,” Shawn said, spitting toothpaste into the sink. He’d taken a security job at night so that she could cut back on her dog-walking clients and pay her employees to take her place. She was still taking a few trips a week, mostly because she needed to get out of the house. Plus, she could be plotting out her book while she was walking the dogs, so it wasn’t like she was shirking her responsibilities. Theoretically, at least.

  “I feel awful for you,” she told him. “You’re working yourself to death.” Even though they were almost definitely going to be loaded in the very near future, Shawn had insisted that he could never be a lazy, jobless loafer. He’d been putting in fifty hours a week as a workers’ comp claims adjuster while he was putting himself through law school, and he was still doing both. But instead of feeling pressured to pursue an in-house position with an oil and gas conglomerate or some other ridiculously high-paying (and soul-stealing) path, in light of their imminent wealth he had decided he was going to become a public defender. Like Jules, he’d been raised in near poverty by a single mom, but unlike Jules, he had a father who had been a wife-beating asshole before he died. Shawn dreamed of putting men like Adam Richardson behind bars. In the meantime, they had bills to pay. Jules certainly couldn’t finish her novel if they couldn’t pay their mortgage and became homeless before she hit her deadline.

  “Yeah, you should really feel awful for me,” Shawn joked. “Sucks to be married to a millionaire bestselling author. However will I cope?” He feigned wiping his brow.

  “You’re funny,” she said now. “But seriously, you’re working yourself to death and you never complain about everything you’re doing around here and you’re my biggest fan and just, you know, thanks.” How had she gotten so lucky? Most days she felt like pinching herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming him up. Shawn stepped in for a hug, but she pushed him away. “I’m dripping wet! You’ll get soaked.”

  He wrapped his long arms around her anyway.

  “Do you think I care?” he said. “About my shirt getting wet or about working a little harder than usual? It’s just for a year, and I’m so proud of you I can’t even stand it. Honestly. When can I read something? I know you hate it when I ask that, but I’m dying for a peek. I promise I won’t try to edit it or offer any suggestions. How about just a page? The first page, that’s it. And then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Nope, sorry,” she said. She gave him a quick kiss and pulled back to survey the damage. The front of his T-shirt, as she had predicted, had a giant wet imprint of her body on it. “Look at you. I told you.”

  “And I told you, I don’t care. It’ll dry. And fine, be stingy about your book. I guess I’ll have to wait with all of the other nobodies to enjoy your brilliance. But tell me one thing: Am I in there? Even, like, thinly veiled? Come on, throw me a bone.”

  Jules laughed. “Of course you’re in there. You’re one of the main characters.”

  “Excellent,” he said with a grin. “Now get to work. You’ve got all day to whip out one solid, finished page.”

  Or twenty or thirty, she said in her head.

  It was already February, and Jules had yet to come up with a single viable idea. She tortured herself daily with the new, updated calculations for how many pages she needed to write a month, a week, a day. Write about what you know, people always said. What did Jules know, exactly? Death and hardship and miserable mothers and messed-up sisters who wouldn’t return your texts or phone calls. Who wanted to read about that? No, she needed a big idea, something she could sink her teeth into and really run with. Her dad had written thrillers teeming with espionage and international terrorism and nuclear war, and Jules could confidently say that none of those things would fall into the what-she-knew category. Then again, her da
d didn’t have firsthand experience with any of those things, either, that she knew of, and he had managed to crank out a half-dozen books in the genre. The more she thought about it, the more confusing and daunting the whole prospect became.

  She sat down once again at her desk. A book about a man . . . a good, honest, hardworking husband who loved his wife and dreamed of being a millionaire. She couldn’t think of a thing to write—or anything more god-awful boring.

  Brooke

  Brooke turned her back to the floor-length mirror and let her bathrobe slide to the floor. It had been years since she’d actually looked at herself without clothes on, and she had no desire to break her stellar record of avoidance anytime soon.

  She stepped into the shower, thinking about how good it was going to feel to be a runner again, to actually use—and maybe even like—her body after all these years. She’d been tall and naturally thin as a child, and the junior high cross-country coach had sought her out on these qualities alone. Brooke had never been sought out for anything, ever, and she’d been both thrilled and terrified by it.

  “You run?” Coach Bradley had asked, sizing up her gangly limbs. He’d been watching her class play field hockey, and apparently had liked something he’d seen.

  “Not really,” Brooke had admitted. “I mean, just in PE I guess.”

  “Well, you do now,” Coach had insisted. “See you on the track at three o’clock.” When Juliana insisted on driving her to her first meet, Brooke hadn’t just shown up; she’d shone. For the first time since her father died, she thought maybe she saw something in her mother—a spark of interest, an inkling of something almost resembling encouragement. Brooke had never wanted to excel at anything so badly. What nature hadn’t given her in the way of innate talent, she made up for in sheer drive. She pushed herself until she puked, and then she pushed herself some more. There were girls out there with far more experience and athletic ability than she had, but none had her determination. She won meet after meet, often beating her own records. Where had that girl gone? she wondered now as she dried herself. Where was the girl who would endure self-inflicted pain to get what she wanted?