Lourdes smelled of vanilla and Febreeze, which meant she’d had some sort of wardrobe crisis this morning. Even on Big Trash Friday—which, for us, meant moving day—Lourdes looked perfectly put-together and pristine. She’d been like that for as long as I’d known her. Raised by a strict, old-fashioned grandmother, she operated on the idea that it was proper to look nice for every occasion, not just special ones. And, through some magic I could never quite master, she always managed to make everyone else look underdressed.
Because I could smell her—the vanilla-cookies smell only became really noticeable when her skin began to heat up—I knew Lourdes was beginning to tire. She was always embarrassed at being the smaller and weaker of the two of us, so I sat down first on the couch we were lugging around. Lourdes collapsed onto the seat next to me, face flushed prettily.
“Enjoying yourself?” I asked lightly. She huffed and puffed and shook her head. She had a Hawaiian look about her, with a round, golden face and silky black hair. Somehow, she never sweated, and the dark makeup around her eyes never smudged. Even I had never seen her looking anything less than perfect, and I lived with her.
“Well, you look as lovely as the dew on a spring flower,” I teased, to hide the fact that she really did look lovely. If Lourdes envied me strength, I was utterly jealous of her beauty. She was willowy and perfect and daily had people stopping dead on the street to admire her. She was smart, and the only reason we were fishing furniture out of people’s trash was that she hadn’t yet found a newspaper requiring her journalistic abilities.
I was Lourdes’ big rebellion, the only thing about her that would make her grandmother squeak. Sometimes I worried that was the only reason she loved me.
She patted my hand. “You lie to me, Nora,” she panted. She pulled her hair off her neck and quickly looped it into a perfect bun. It took me at least ten minutes to do my hair with any style—as it was, today I’d just thrown it into a ponytail and decided to hell with it.
Flopping down into my lap, Lourdes enveloped me with her vanilla-and-Fabreeze scent. Whenever I starting thinking I was jealous of her, so jealous that I was beginning to hate her, she did this and I started to love her all over again.
“I wish we could just sit here forever, Nor,” she told me, tracing a circle on her knee. “Just you and me, on this couch, with no jobs to go to, and no groceries to buy, and no laundry to clean. We could ignore everyone else and everything else and it would be just perfect.”
Lourdes sure knew how to spin a pretty story. I maintained that she could convince you to give her your last nickel, and not only make you think you really, really wanted to do it, but also have you believe that it made you a better person to do so. I knew her well enough that I knew I couldn’t always believe her stories.
Reaching down, Lourdes started shredding a handful of grass. “I love you,” I reminded her, so she could remind me when I forgot. Sometimes I forgot, like when I started thinking about how she’d be much better off with a boy that she could take home to her family. When I started thinking how perfect she’d look in a wedding dress, with lace and pearls and a ring. When I started thinking about how she deserved a family, with little children running around begging for treats and rides and the stories she told so well.
She started sticking bits of clover leaves onto my bare legs. Lourdes wore no shorts—she stuck strictly to skirts and slacks, with the occasional forage into a pair of dark jeans that hugged her perfect curves. She was a knockout when she paired them with a red top.
With a contented sigh, she sat up to rub her snub nose against mine, which had a bump in the middle and was too big by half. “I know,” she said, getting up to start lifting again. Pride dictated that she had to initiate the activity, because she could barely manage. “I know even when you don’t.”
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