Chapter 5 - Noon
The livestream started at twelve sharp the next day.
I moved around my kitchen while Diane appeared in a small square beside me on the screen.
"Fridge first," someone commented.
I opened mine and started wiping down the shelves.
Diane pulled her refrigerator door open. A jar rolled forward and shattered on the tile.
Her kitchen looked a lot cleaner than it had at four that morning. She'd clearly stayed up practicing. Unfortunately, the kitchen wasn't cooperating.
"Strong start, Diane 😂."
She forced a smile. "Accidents happen."
Then she knocked over a carton of milk. It ran across the shelf and soaked through her socks.
"Fridge: 2. Diane: 0."
I glanced at my spotless shelf. "Want a minute to catch up?"
Her expression said everything.
"Top of the fridge!" someone wrote.
Diane reached up and dragged two fingers across it. They came back gray.
"OMG SHE FOUND A NEW SPECIES OF DUST."
Her smile disappeared.
Then came the cabinets. She yanked one open too fast and sent three plastic containers crashing onto the counter.
"THE CABINET IS FIGHTING BACK."
Meanwhile I'd already finished mine and moved on to a basket of laundry. When someone asked her to fold a fitted sheet, Diane looked personally betrayed by the internet.
Then somebody challenged us to wipe down our range hoods. Mine took ten seconds. Diane scrubbed hers twice, and the cloth still came away brown with grease.
I held up my clean rag and laughed. "Diane, should I pretend I didn't see that?"
She didn't laugh.
That was the moment she stopped performing. The cheerful Facebook smile was gone. So were the little speeches about how things were supposed to be done. She just stood there, gripping the dirty cloth while the comments scrolled past.
"I don't know why everyone's ganging up on me," she said.
But she didn't sound angry anymore.
I was ready to remind her that public humiliation had been her idea.
Then I noticed her hand shaking.
"Diane," I said. "Forget the comments. Just finish the task."
"I can't."
"What do you mean?"
She slowly lowered herself down onto the kitchen floor.
"I mean I can't do any of it, Megan. I never could."
The comments stopped.
"You and Adam have this… this whole life. Your house, your jobs, dinner on the table every night. You make all of it look so easy."
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
"Every time I came to your house, I went looking for something wrong. Dust. Dinner. Laundry. Anything. Because if I could find one thing you were failing at, I didn't have to sit with everything I'm failing at here."
I stared at her. "You were looking for reasons to judge me?"
"I was looking for reasons not to judge myself."
She looked around her kitchen.
"And when I walked in and saw you in that bed, I finally had something I could use. So I used it."
Eight years of little hums, inspections, corrections, and impossible standards clicked into place all at once.
None of it had ever really been about my house. It had been about hers.
Three days earlier, I had wanted her humiliated. Ten minutes earlier, I had wanted to beat her at her own game.
Now I'd won. And it didn't feel like anything at all.
"Adam," I said. "End the stream."
May you like
Diane looked up. "Megan…"
"We're done."
