Some More Nichole

Her stepfather was going to chiropractor school and the money that didn’t keep her half-brother alive went to pay for his tricky technique learning. He would demonstrate on her mom, and Nichole hated to hear her mom’s joints popping or any of her mom’s happy, chiropractised sounds. During dinner once, he had been booming on about some wonderful new neck stabilizer or something (Nichole had still been chewing on the Aloha! that had inevitably begun the dinner conversation), when he and her mom scooted out of their plastic folding chairs and tried the stabilizing method out. Her mom lay across both of their unoccupied chairs while her stepfather practiced between bites. Nichole’s mom’s neck may have been stabilized effectively if the chairs she laid on had stabilized. As it was, she and the plastic chairs dove into a cheap heap. And that made her mom and stepfather laugh their eyes out too. Nichole’s eyes just rolled, and she looked hungrily at her half-brother’s full plate.

So Nichole decided to stop avoiding the memories aching to replay in the very front of her forehead. She gave them an encore. But it was a timid one, a quiet bravisimmo crepitated in fear and suppressed pride and excitement. Her mental screen curtain opened and they began, and she remembered being grabbed after eating a real dinner and then being held by the hollow of her back, where it curved in like a hissing cat on a hot tin roof and then being pressured so close-exhilaratingly-close that she almost felt like his hand was on his own stomach rather than her back. And then she was watching television yesterday and it happened again, though this time it only lasted a few seconds. She asked him why he did that, and wondered how it made her feel that way deep inside. “Hey, um. So why do you do that anyway? I mean. Um. What is it for?” And she wanted to add, “It makes me feel like there is water boiling inside of me, cooking some spaghetti. Or more of a linguine. Or maybe bowtie pasta.” But all she said was, “What is it called, I mean? Uh…” He rescued her questions about questions. “Do you mean you’ve never had a hug before?” And Nichole’s insides started boiling again, ecstatic with the revelation that she’d finally been hugged so that’s what that was and that feeling was nice and maybe chiropractors are professional huggers and that’s why mom married him. And Nichole remembered this particular memory and it made her happy. She had been hugged for the first time in her memory, finally, at thirteen. But no one is that alone. She was still just a hair off of the truth, a bit skewed in denotative accuracy. And her heartbeat, which had sped up during that memory’s remembrance, slowed down as her stride lessened and she arrived back at her father’s house, in hopes of more hugs but never expecting any.