You would never think that the best offensive lineman Huckabee High had ever seen could tattoo something so delicate, but Big Eddie is a real artist. And also a total softie. I think he maybe cried the hardest at my mom’s funeral, and they’d only been in homeroom together at school.
“Hey, Big Eddie!” I call out to him.
He glances up, beaming when he sees it’s me, his eyes practically disappearing behind his round cheeks. “Emily! You here for the special?”
I nod, patting the enormous binder sitting on the front counter, pages of designs overflowing out of it. Blake leans over my shoulder, her face lighting up when she sees the faded black Sharpie on the cover: CLEARINSE BINDER.
“Let’s hope he tattoos better than he spells,” she whispers to me.
I elbow her in the side, and she elbows me right back, a big grin appearing on her face.
“You’re not gonna chicken out this time, are ya?” Big Eddie asks, the tattoo gun buzzing again as he leans back over the girl’s wrist.
I grimace, cringing. I look over to see Blake open her mouth to tease me. “Say a word and I will never talk to you again.”
“That’ll be pretty tough considering I’m your ride home,” she says, leaning casually against the counter.
I give her a look before turning my attention back to Eddie. “Can I maybe get something not in the clearance binder?”
“No can do, Em,” he says, his eyes focused on the tattoo he’s doing. “You know the rules of the special.”
My heart sinks, but I refuse to turn back now. Yeah, this is an invincible summer. But it’s mine.
Maybe my tattoo doesn’t have to be the same as Mom’s.
Maybe this should be for me.
Determined, I lean over the pages of the binder. A purple butterfly, a devil smoking a cigarette, a cup of coffee with a halo, a disheveled-looking goat. I have no idea how these were all squeezed together on the same sheet of paper, but all the pages are like that.
No theme. Just tiny, random drawings spread out on a blanket of white.
Blake points at a piece of pizza wearing sunglasses, amused. “Where would you even put a tattoo like that?”
“Oh, that’s a definite butt tattoo,” I say.
“Well, pizza does go straight to your ass.”
We keep looking, the binder slowly passing the halfway point. I feel a small pit of dread deep in my stomach, as I begin to worry that I won’t find anything. Nothing that really means something.
I put my hand into my pocket, fingers wrapping instinctively around the quarter.
Two more pages go by. Then another three.
Nothing.
I turn the page once more, and suddenly there it is, calling out to me. A small sunflower, the deep yellow the same warm color as the sunflowers in my mom’s garden. The same ones my dad lays on my mom’s grave every year.
It’s like a sign from her. Something real and significant in this massive binder of comical images. Lucky.
I push away from the heavy binder, nodding determinedly, the dread releasing its grip on me.
“You picked one?” Blake asks, her eyes scanning the page eagerly.
“Yeah, it’s—”
She grabs my arm, stopping me. “Shh! I want to guess.”
She narrows her eyes but doesn’t pull her hand away, looking between me and the images, her dark eyebrows furrowing as she makes her way down the page.
Finally, she taps the sunflower, peering up at me eagerly. “Sunflowers! Like your mom’s garden.” I nod, a warm feeling filling my chest at her validation.
“I mean, it was a tough call between that and the dancing donut.…”
“Fair,” she says, sliding out of the way as Big Eddie lumbers over with the freshly tattooed girl.
“What’ll it be?” he asks as he reaches under the counter to grab a clipboard.
I point to the sunflower and he nods, giving Blake a quick look before grabbing some paperwork and sliding it into the metal clasp of the clipboard.
“You getting one?” he asks.
Blake shakes her head. “Not today! May come back for the slice of pizza in the sunglasses, though.”
Big Eddie holds out the clipboard to me and lets out a low chuckle. “You’d be surprised the number of people that get that one.” His eyes shift over to meet mine. “Where you getting yours at, Em?”
I tap the bare skin of my forearm, trying to imagine that space no longer smooth and blank. I wonder if it felt weird to her too, if she chose that spot because she’d always see it and be reminded.
He nods to the black fold-out chairs. “Look over all these documents and give them a signature. I’ll get everything ready.”
I manage to pick the structurally safe fold-out chair, but Blake, on the other hand, has the plastic seat buckle almost completely out from under her. She perches unsteadily on the edge of the chair, her eyes wide as she waits for a total collapse.
Her expression cracks me up so much that it takes everything in me to turn my attention back to the clipboard in front of me.
I scan it while Big Eddie rings up Katie, then preps everything for my tattoo. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory, talking about infection and how Big Eddie always sanitizes everything and uses clean needles and all that.
Even though I can literally see him doing it now, a month ago I would have been running for the door after Googling tattoo-related infections, the worst-case scenarios guiding my decision.
Like this past February when I came with Kiera.
There’s no denying the fact that the thoughts still come this time. But, when they do, I think about just how great this tattoo will be. How another list item will be checked off. How my mom must have felt in
