girl crush.

The dinner table is alive with its usual chaotic energy; a muddled din of voices talking over each other, hungry stomachs scraping at plates, and forks clashing as at least three people try to swiftly stab the last smothered enchilada off the platter in the middle of the table.

The conversations all bleed into one another, which is why Sam doesn’t expect when her mother addresses her directly.

“Oh, Sammy! The Memorial Day Parade still needs volunteers for the food stands, so I signed you up!” 

Sam blinks, brow furrowing. “... What?”

“Yeah, well...” Annabeth pauses to take another bite of food, subconsciously leaving her daughter in a silent panic for another minute. “They need someone smart who can keep up with the money.”

“But... I got a biology essay due on Tuesday.”

“That’s alright! The parade’s on Friday.”

Sam’s eyes close and she has to remind herself to breathe. “I know. But I wasn’t expectin’ to even go to the Memorial Day Parade.”

“Well now you can.”

“No,” Sam stresses this point, as if her life depends on it. “I can’t ‘cause I got a biology paper due on Tuesday.”

“Sam—”

“No.” 

The very idea of it makes her hair stand on end; a hot, sticky feeling brewing in the pit of her stomach like a bad omen. And the frustration of her mother knowing exactly why she doesn’t want to go—the unspoken reason that the entire house has danced around for most of her life—only makes it feel that much more like some kind of betrayal. 

Annabeth, for her part, remains calm in the face of defiance. “Sam, it won’t be that bad. You only have to talk to the people who go to your booth.”

“I ain’t goin’.”

... Well, until the defiance continues, and then her patience (as only a mother of five children can fully understand) evaporates into thin air. “YES, you are. I already signed you up. That’s the end of it.”

“It’s the end of it ‘cause I ain’t goin’,” Sam mumbles.

“Jesus Christ,” Annabeth laughs, the kind of humorless laugh that’s typically reserved for the likes of Theo or Lip; the kind that happens right before she starts flinging her slippers around the house and threatening to ground everyone for the next twenty years. But she doesn’t do either of those things. “For one day, can you PLEASE just be—” Her temper gets the better of her, and she nearly finishes her sentence before she stops herself; as if suddenly realizing who she’s directing her syllables toward.

Normal.

The word remains unspoken, but it hangs heavy in the air between them; both Davenport women staring unblinkingly at each other, raw and angry, and each looking as if they’ve just been slapped across the face by the other.

The usual din of dinner has long since quieted; several eyes nervously watching the pair as if they’re waiting for an atomic bomb to drop.

Sam drops her fork onto her plate with a clatter. Her tongue runs over her top teeth, preparing itself for a vicious pettiness only capable of being delivered by fourteen-year-old girls. “... Your food needs salt,” she mumbles, voice cracking with a hurt that stings even as she drags her chair back with a sharp scrape against the weather floorboards.

The silence that ensues is heavy; breaths being held as footsteps stomp down the hallway, followed by the telltale slam of a bedroom door.

At the end of the table, Rhett exhales slowly, eyes fluttering closed. He shakes his head, giving Annabeth a silent but withering look of disappointment (one that strikes a particular resemblance to the one Sam had just given her). He wordlessly hands his hardwon enchilada over to Lip, and then disappears down the hallway in his daughter’s footsteps.

Sam doesn’t go to the Memorial Day Parade, and Annabeth doesn’t ask her to. It takes another week and a half for the two of them to talk to each other again; for Sam to finally relent, when her mother bursts into tears at the foot of her bed, clinging to her with every limb as she apologizes profusely and promises that she doesn’t think of her as anything close to nontypical.

Soon enough, they fall back into a usual routine. Memorial Day passes in a whirl. Sam aces her biology paper. Annabeth bakes cookies to celebrate. The farm gets new patches of spring crops planted for the fall harvest.