1
When Cat’s Buttons Are Pushed
30 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
The assault on Cat’s nose was quick and painful.
“Manure,” she said, buckling herself into the passenger seat.
“I know.” Angeline sighed. “First day of school makes me want to curse too, though less like a farmer.”
“I mean the smell. In my car.”
“Our car.”
“Gramps gave it to me last year.”
“With the intention of sharing it with me this year.”
Angeline finished the last over, under, over of her long braid and secured it with a black elastic, nearly the same color as her roots and Cat’s blunt bob. Twenty minutes it had taken Cat to flatten her light-socket cowlicks, and yet her sister perfected the black to brown to honey to gold ribbons of her ombre side braid while behind the wheel of the silver hatchback that had been their grandfather’s until the eye chart said otherwise.
Cat nuzzled into the familiar leather, slippery and smooth from wear. “Well, the car—”
“Our car.” Angeline turned the key, and the hatchback sputtered to life. She backed out of their apartment building’s assigned parking spot with the barest of glances in the rearview mirror. She’d had her license for all of five minutes, but already she was a more confident and skilled driver than Cat, who’d had her license for nearly a year.
“Fine.” Cat wrinkled her pale nose. “But it smells.”
“That unscented lotion you insist on using isn’t so much unscented as reeking of antiseptic. Seriously, Cat, a little mango-lime wouldn’t kill you.”
“It’s not me.” Cat swiveled her neck, spying first her sister’s tanned thighs peeking out of her dress-code-violating skirt and then something gold and shimmery on the floor of the back seat.
“Another one of your freebies?” Cat said. “Don’t tell me. It’s some lipstick—”
“No.”
“Dry shampoo—”
“Stop.”
“Yoga pants or corset revival—”
“Enough, Cat.”
Right. Cat reached behind the seat and picked up the gold bag. Another half-baked test product from some “women-empowering”—definition loosely applied—startup. The single demeaning word “better” was written in minuscule lowercase letters across the front and inside—
“My God!” Cat flinched at the stench. “I think I’m going blind.” She gingerly removed the gray cylindrical package, stamped with “bigger is better” in the same tiny font whose irony she’d bet had been lost on the perky female founders. “What is this?”
“Facial rejuvenator. Says it works best when heated naturally by the warmth of the sun.”
“So you’re leaving it in my car?”
“Our car.”
“Which now smells like a rest stop on 95 during an August heat wave.”
“They added essential oils.” Angeline extended her long neck and sniffed. “Don’t you get the lavender?”
“No. The only essential I get is shi—”
“Night soil,” Angeline corrected.
Cat dropped the cylinder. “As in . . . ?”
“Waste matter. Recycled.”
“That you put on your face?” Cat rubbed her fingers on the side of her khaki cargo skirt—two inches below the knee, one more than required by the student handbook. “Please tell me it’s not human.”
Angeline rolled her eyes. “Obviously.”
“Right. Of course. Obviously.” Cat tied the bag shut. She held it between two fingers and eyed the open window.
“Don’t even think about it,” Angeline said.
“Your funeral, which is a very real possibility if you use that.” Cat tossed the bag behind her seat and zipped open her backpack. She squirted half the container of hand sanitizer into her palm.
“It’s approved . . . ish,” Angeline said. “Elephant mostly, I think.”
Cat groaned as she smeared hand sanitizer on her nose. “Because ‘bigger is better.’ That’s disgusting. You really have no line.”
“What I have are two hundred thousand subscribers and the chance to turn that into two million. Ten times my current ad revenue. Ten. Mom could retire. Let Dad suck on that.”
“Sure. Thanks to YouTube voyeuristic weirdos, who you cater to.”
Angeline shifted her hazel eyes from the road to Cat. “Have you even watched recently? Seen the likes from Evelyn’s Epic Everyday? Read the comments?”
“Do you want me to?”
Angeline faced front again and shrugged with the grace of a princess bending in her thousandth curtsey. A shoulder lift and fall that Cat knew every muscle twitch of. She and her sister shared a room and a grade but little else.
Cat twisted toward the open window, breathing in air heavy with the smell of the ocean and donuts from the lone chain store in town. Angeline had taken the scenic route, chauffeuring them from their apartment complex at one end of the five-block stretch of the harbor to the other. Since their unit faced the back, they didn’t get a glimpse of the deep blue waters along Frontage Street that defined the town and everyone in it.
They passed the aging grocery, well-stocked hardware store, and two-screen movie theater with gum from the seventies cemented to the seats. Sprinkled in between were more ice cream stands than a stretch of real estate this small could normally sustain, though half would shutter before the first frost, hibernating until spring. The requisite Irish bar and hipster gastropub nestled in among the year-round clothing, home decor, and accessories shops that, like the harbor itself, somehow managed to fall on the right side of cute versus cheesy—a rarity in towns that wouldn’t be towns without the ocean drawing people to them. All these businesses were potential advertisers for The Red and Blue. Cat had made her pitch to most of them over the past couple of weeks.
She glanced at her white plastic digital watch, and Angeline huffed.
“What?” Cat said.
“We’re not late. And if we were, it’d be your fault not mine. I was the one waiting in the car for you.”
Because you hit stop instead of snooze on my phone’s alarm so you could drive.
Cat took a steadying breath. “I just wanted a chance to stop by—”
“The newsroom, I know. Your second home.”