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CHAPTER 5
THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE
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Roaming the streets was a good way to get arrested in this neighborhood.
Gabrielle needed to pee. She wanted to go home and deny Operation Homesitting ever existed.
It's her sex drive that looked around, raised the sweat-slippery key and unlocked the Chervonys' front door, her sex drive that stepped in and disappeared, casual like a burglar.
Inside, it was Gabrielle who paused, her back against the door, pinned there by the weight of an empty house, staring into its depths.
A look at her phone. 3:22pm
Hours to do anything she wanted. A phrase her sex drive liked.
So Gabrielle pounced at a most convenient answer to the question
What do I do now?
She reminded herself that at its inception Homesitting was fairly simple. The initial idea had been nothing more than to find a way to try out nudism.
Really all she had to do was to follow these tracks for an hour or less and everyone would be satisfied. She'd be home in time for
Futurama
.
She took her shoes off.
Nothing wrong with taking your shoes off.
She didn't untie them, she trampled her lilac All-Stars under her heels just to remain as upright and immobile as possible.
And then she was back at looking into this big stranger that is someone's home, alone.
In such a place the silence was different. Guilty, if such an adjective could apply to such a noun. Even though Gabrielle had probably spent more than half of her life in this house. She had memories for each year, each season, each room.
She took one meek step forward, away from her shoes, and the exit. Then her legs brought her away from the entryway, into the living-room. She was still wandering, really. Although in her mind everything was already there, all the things her damn sex drive had mapped out.
So it was not the view that drew her to the sliding patio doors. It was a pro-tip. She may gaze upon the backyard for as long as she wanted, the lawn illuminated by an unbroken blue sky, with the swimming pool gleaming in response a few yards on her left; she could recall the time she helped sowing the patches of tomatoes and pumpkins, on her right in the distance; she could even look at the fingerprints she was leaving on the pane, all this only shone in the foreground of her mind. In the back of it, where it mattered, pressed the peculiarity of this backyard, quite unique in Los Angeles: no one could see from outside.
She had put this urban anomaly to the test several times and had always come to the same conclusion. Only the helicopters could spy on you here. A feature which, uncoincidentally, the Chervonys enjoyed on a daily basis.
Gabrielle tried to swallow her nervousness.
She needed to plan out.
The better place was Lily's room upstairs and she went there, and there she felt the temporary respite brought by acting upon a decision. Until she would have to think of the next one.
Sit on the bed.
Let out a long sigh.
Relax.
Act like it was
your
idea.
I need to have my phone with me at all times.
Her phone. Suddenly reassuring and threatening.
She could play it out. It would ring with the strength of a fire alarm and: '
Abort! I repeat, abort! Mom forgot her passport, we'll be there in five seconds! Gabe, for the love of God, GET OUT OF HERE!
'
She snorted, put it in her backpocket as she stood up. There was one thing she could do. It's been poking at her.
Gabrielle went to the bathroom to relieve her bladder.
And it was a sequence of easy decisions:
She lifted the seat up, took her penis out, pulled the waistband of her boxer briefs under her ballsack and waited.
Because her need to pee had been this kind of fake-urge created by stress, merely a drop stinging the inside of her urethra with no real pressure above it, she got plenty of time to appreciate the main perk of penises. To pee while standing.
Not the best position to take an emergency call--her phone could slip from her hand and fall into the bowl--but good enough to take an emergency run; and anyway, she would allow herself this moment of pride.
She stood there, concentrating, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as if it would help her go. She pulled her foreskin just a little so it wouldn't spritz everywhere around.
Don't forget to lower the seat or they'll freak out.
Almost starting to get bored, Gabrielle looked around. The cabinet on her right, she knew what was inside. Toilet paper, tampons, cleaning products... And a box of those little plastic funnels they made for women to pee standing up. Typically the kind of crap Isla would buy.
Gabrielle opened the door and saw it was still unused, sealed and forgotten.
She smirked.
Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.
She shook her head slowly, though still smirking. She was at the stage where she said memes in her head; next one would be spouting them aloud. She needed to get out more, she needed friends, she needed...to become...cool.
Cooler.
She dropped her pants and sat on the toilet. Tinkling began immediately.
Once she was done she wiped, stood up, lowered the seat and flushed, clenched her teeth at the noise which in these circumstances was dramatically deafening. During the long-drawn-out ruckus of pipes, she removed her pants and underwear so she didn't have to do the penguin walk to the sink, where she washed her hands and then rinsed her glans and foreskin. This was something she never did usually, an effort which could only mean one thing but Gabrielle eluded and instead winced at the water dripping on her socks.
Back in the bedroom, pants back on, and all this had felt way too rapid for her nerves. Because from there she had only one logical thing left to do. So she started thinking of other things to do.
And whatever I want is a lot of things.
She paced up and down the room. Her gaze stumbled--or did not stumble--upon the objects presented like antiques on the shelf next to Lily's desk.
One of them was an old NES controller.
Gabrielle didn't want to play video games. She walked over to observe it blankly.
In fact she was memorizing its position, the way the cord entangled, the dust on it and around it.
Only then she picked it up.
She shook it next to her ear.
The screwdriver was in the same drawer as the emergency cutlery.